pw

■m

■■RT

OXFORD AND
HER COLLEGES

GOLD WIN SMITH

ST0RAGE-ITE1
MAIN LIBRARY

LP9-R1 5G

U.B.C. LIBRARY

rasas

K$8

WBBBBm

BBSS ';-' :•-'■'■■'"

|| :;■' ■:.■■,:: :. .

mmsm

THE LIBRARY

THE UNIVERSITY OF
BRITISH COLUMBIA

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES

«£

J^%

Digitized by the Internet Archive

in 2010 with funding from

University of British Columbia Library

http://www.archive.org/details/oxfordhercollegOOsmit

RADCLIFFE LIBRARY.

OXFORD

AND HER COLLEGES

& Uitfo from tije Babclifte Htfrrarg

BY

GOLDWIN SMITH, D.C.L.

AUTHOR OF " THE UNITED STATES : AN OUTLINE OF
POLITICAL HISTORY," ETC.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS REPRODUCED FROM PHOTOGRAPHS

MACMILLAN AND CO.

AND LONDON
l895

All rights reserved

Copyright, 1893,
By MACMILLAN AND CO.

I

tfl

NorfajooU ^ress :

J. S. Cushing & Co. — Berwick & Sniitll.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

PREFACE.

PHE writer has seldom enjoyed himself
more than in showing an American
friend over Oxford. He has felt some-
thing of the same enjoyment in prepar-
ing, with the hope of interesting some
American visitors, this outline of the his-
tory of the University and her Colleges.
He would gladly believe that Oxford and
Cambridge, having now, by emancipation
and reform, been reunited to the nation,
may also be reunited to the race; and
that to them, not less than to the Uni-
versities of Germany, the eyes of Ameri-

yj PREFACE.

cans desirous of studying at a European
as well as at an American University may
henceforth be turned.

It was once the writer's duty, in the
service of a Royal Commission of Inquiry,
to make himself well acquainted with the
archives of the University and its Col-
leges. But he has also availed himself
of a number of recent publications, such
as the series of the Oxford Historical
Society, the history of the University by
Mr. Maxwell Lyte, and the volume on
the Colleges of Oxford and their tradi-
tions, edited by Mr. Andrew Clark, as
well as of the excellent little Guide pub-
lished by Messrs. James Parker and Co.

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

S^PfWt^O gain a view of Oxford from a
central point, we mount to the top
of the Radcliffe Library. We
will hope that it is a fine summer day,
that, as we come out upon the roof, the
old city, with all its academical build-
ings lying among their gardens and
groves, presents itself to view in its
beauty, and that the sound of its bells,
awakening the memories of the ages, is in
the air. The city is seen lying on the
spit of gravel between the Isis, as the

2 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

Thames is here called, which is the scene
of boat races, and the Cherwell, famed for
water-lilies. It is doubtful whether the
name means the ford of the oxen, or the
ford of the river (oxen being a corruption
of otisen). Flat, sometimes flooded, is the
site. To ancient founders of cities, a river
for water carriage and rich meads for kine
were prime attractions. But beyond the
flat we look to a lovely country, rolling
and sylvan, from many points of which,
Wytham, Hinksey, Bagley, Headington,
Elsfield, Stowe Wood, are charming views,
nearer or more distant, of the city. Tur-
ner's view is taken from Bagley, but it is
rather a Turner poem than a simple pict-
ure of Oxford.

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 3

There is in Oxford much that is not
as old as it looks. The buildings of
the Bodleian Library, University College,
Oriel, Exeter, and some others, mediaeval
or half mediaeval in their style, are Stuart
in date. In Oxford the Middle Ages
lingered long. Yon cupola of Christ
Church is the work of Wren, yon towers
of All Souls' are the work of a still later
hand. The Headington stone, quickly
growing black and crumbling, gives the
buildings a false hue of antiquity. An
American visitor, misled by the blackness
of University College, remarked to his
host that the buildings must be im-
mensely old. " No," replied his host,
11 their colour deceives you ; their age is

4 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

not more than two hundred years." It
need not be said that Palladian edifices
like Queen's, or the new buildings of
Magdalen, are not the work of a Chaplain
of Edward III., or a Chancellor of Henry
VI. But of the University buildings, St.
Mary's Church and the Divinity School,
of the College buildings, the old quad-
rangles of Merton, New College, Mag-
dalen, Brasenose, and detached pieces not
a few are genuine Gothic of the Founders'
age. Here are six centuries, if you choose
to include the Norman castle, here are
eight centuries, and, if you choose to in-
clude certain Saxon remnants in Christ
Church Cathedral, here are ten centuries,
chronicled in stone. Of the corporate

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 5

lives of these Colleges, the threads have
run unbroken through all the changes and
revolutions, political, religious, and social,
between the Barons' War and the present
hour. The economist goes to their muni-
ment rooms for the record of domestic
management and expenditure during those
ages. Till yesterday, the codes of statutes
embodying their domestic law, though
largely obsolete, remained unchanged.
Nowhere else in England, at all events,
unless it be at the sister University, can
the eye and mind feed upon so much
antiquity, certainly not upon so much
antique beauty, as on the spot where we
stand. That all does not belong to the
same remote antiquity, adds to the inter-

Q OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

est and to the charm. This great home
of learning, with its many architectures,
has been handed from generation to gen-
eration, each generation making its own
improvements, impressing its own tastes,
embodying its own tendencies, down to
the present hour. It is like a great family
mansion, which owner after owner has
enlarged or improved to meet his own
needs or tastes, and which, thus chroni-
cling successive phases of social and
domestic life, is wanting in uniformity but
not in living interest or beauty.

Oxford is a federation of Colleges. It
had been strictly so for two centuries,
and every student had been required to

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 7

be a member of a College when, in 1856,
non-collegiate students, of whom there
are now a good many, were admitted.
The University is the federal government.
The Chancellor, its nominal head, is a
non-resident grandee, usually a political
leader whom the University delights to
honour and whose protection it desires.
Only on great state occasions does he
appear in his gown richly embroidered
with gold. The acting chief is the Vice-
Chancellor, one of the heads of Colleges,
who marches with the Bedel carrying the
mace before him, and has been sometimes
taken by strangers for the attendant of
the Bedel. With him are the two Proc-
tors, denoted by their velvet sleeves, named

8 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

by the Colleges in turn, the guardians
of University discipline. The University
Legislature consists of three houses, —
an elective Council, made up equally of
heads of Colleges, professors, and Masters
of Arts; the Congregation of residents,
mostly teachers of the University or Col-
leges; and the Convocation, which con-
sists of all Masters of Arts, resident or
non-resident, if they are present to vote.
Congregation numbers four hundred, Con-
vocation nearly six thousand. Legislation
is initiated by the Council, and has to
make its way through Convocation and
Congregation, with some chance of being
wrecked between the academical Congre-
gation, which is progressive, and the rural

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 9

Convocation, which is conservative. The
University regulates the general studies,
holds all the examinations, except that at
entrance, which is held by the Colleges,
confers all the degrees and honours, and
furnishes the police of the academical city.
Its professors form the general and supe-
rior staff of teachers.

Each College, at the same time, is a
little polity in itself. It has its own
governing body, consisting of a Head
(President, Master, Principal, Provost, or
Warden) and a body of Fellows. It holds
its own estates; noble estates, some of
them are. It has its private staff of
teachers or tutors, usually taken from the

10 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

Fellows, though the subjects of teaching
are those recognised by the University
examinations. The relation between the
tutor's teaching and that of the professor
is rather unsettled and debatable, varying
in some measure with the subjects, since
physical science can be taught only in
the professor's lecture-room, while classics
and mathematics can be taught in the
class-room of the tutor. Before 1856 the
professorial system of teaching had long
lain in abeyance, and the tutorial system
had prevailed alone. Each College ad-
ministers its domestic discipline. The
University Proctor, if he chases a student
to the College gates, must there halt and
apply to the College for extradition. To

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. H

the College the student immediately be-
longs; it is responsible for his character
and habits. The personal relations be-
tween him and his tutor are, or ought to
be, close. Oxford life hitherto has been
a College life. To his College the Oxford
man has mainly looked back. Here his
early friendships have been formed. In
these societies the ruling class of England,
the lay professions and landed gentry
mingling with the clergy, has been bred.
It is to the College, generally, that bene-
factions and bequests are given ; with the
College that the rich and munificent
alumnus desires to unite his name; in
the College Hall that he hopes his por-
trait will hang, to be seen with grateful

12 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

eyes. The University, however, shares
the attachment of the alumnus. Go to
yonder river on an evening of the College
boat races, or to yonder cricket ground
when a College match is being played,
and you will see the strength of College
feeling. At a University race or match
in London the Oxford or Cambridge sen-
timent appears. In an American Uni-
versity there is nothing like the College
bond, unless it be that of the Secret, or,
to speak more reasonably, the Greek Let-
ter societies, which form inner social cir-
cles with a sentiment of their own.

The buildings of the University lie
mainly in the centre of the city close

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 13

around us. There is the Convocation
House, the hall of the University Legis-
lature, where, in times of collision between
theological parties, or between the party
of the ancient system of education and
that of the modern system, lively debates
have been heard. In it, also, are con-
ferred the ordinary degrees. They are
still conferred in the religious form of
words, handed down from the Middle
Ages, the candidate kneeling down before
the Vice-Chancellor in the posture of
mediaeval homage. Oxford is the classic
ground of old forms and ceremonies.
Before each degree is conferred, the Proc-
tors march up and down the House to
give any objector to the degree — an un-

14 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

satisfied creditor, for example — the oppor-
tunity of entering a caveat by " plucking "
the Proctors sleeve. Adjoining the Con-
vocation House is the Divinity School,
the only building of the University, sav-
ing St. Mary's Church, which dates from
the Middle Ages. A very beautiful relic
of the Middle Ages it is when seen from
the gardens of Exeter College. Here are
held the examinations for decrees in the-
ology, styled, in the Oxford of old, queen
of the sciences, and long their tyrant.
Here, again, is the Sheldonian Theatre,
the gift of Archbishop Sheldon, a Primate
of the Restoration period, and as readers
of Pepys's " Diary " know, of Restoration
character, but a patron of learning. Uni-

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 15

versity exercises used, during the Middle
Ages, to be performed in St. Mary's
Church. In those days the church was
the public building for all purposes, that
of a theatre among the rest. But the
Anglican was more scrupulous in his use
of the sacred edifice than the Roman
Catholic. In the Sheldonian Theatre is
held the annual commemoration of Found-
ers and benefactors, the grand academical
festival, at which the Doctorate appears
in its pomp of scarlet, filing in to the
sound of the organ, the prize poems and
essays are read, and the honorary degrees
are conferred in the presence of a gala
crowd of visitors drawn by the summer
beauty of Oxford and the pleasures that

16 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

close the studious year. In former days
the ceremony used to be enlivened and
sometimes disgraced by the jests of the
terrcz filius, a licensed or tolerated buffoon
whose personalities provoked the indigna-
tion of Evelyn, and in one case, at least,
were visited with expulsion. It is now
enlivened, and, as visitors think, some-
times disgraced, by the uproarious jok-
ing of the undergraduates' gallery. This
modern license the authorities of the
University are believed to have brought
on themselves by encouraging political
demonstrations. The Sheldonian Thea-
tre is also the scene of grand receptions,
and of the inauguration of the Chancellor.
That flaunting portrait of George IV. in

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 17

his royal robes, by Lawrence, with the mili-
tary portraits of the Emperor of Russia
and the King of Prussia by which it is
flanked and its gorgeousness is rebuked,
mark the triumphs of the monarchs, whose
cause had become that of European inde-
pendence, over Napoleon. Perhaps the
most singular ceremony witnessed by
these walls was the inauguration of the
Iron Duke as Chancellor of the Univer-
sity. This was the climax of Oxford
devotion to the Tory party, and such was
the gathering as to cause it to be said that
if the roof of the Sheldonian Theatre had
then fallen in, the party would have been
extinguished. The Duke, as if to mark
the incongruity, put on his academical cap
c

18 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

with the wrong side in front, and in read-
ing his Latin speech, lapsed into a thun-
dering false quantity.

The Clarendon was built with the pro-
ceeds of the history written by the Min-
ister of the early Restoration, who was
Chancellor of the University, and whose
touching letter of farewell to her, on his
fall and flight from England, may be seen
in the Bodleian Library. There, also,
are preserved documents which may help
to explain his fall. They are the written
dialogues which passed between him and
his master at the board of the Privy
Council, and they show that Clarendon,
having been the political tutor of Charles
the exile, too much bore himself as the

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 19

political tutor of Charles the king. In
the Clarendon are the University Council
Chamber and the Registry. Once it was
the University press, but the press has
now a far larger mansion yonder to the
north-west, whence, besides works of learn-
ing and science, go forth Bibles and prayer-
books in all languages to all quarters of
the globe. Legally, as a printer of Bibles
the University has a privilege, but its real
privilege is that which it secures for itself
by the most scrupulous accuracy and by
infinitesimal profits.

Close by is the University Library, the
Bodleian, one of those great libraries of
the world in which you can ring up at a
few minutes' notice almost any author of

20 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

any age or country. This Library is one
of those entitled by law to a copy of every
book printed in the United Kingdom, and
it is bound to preserve all that it receives,
a duty which might in the end burst any
building, were it not that the paper of
many modern books is happily perishable.
A foundation was laid for a University
Library in the days of Henry VI., by the
good Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, who
gave a collection of books. But in the
rough times which followed, the Duke's
donation perished, only two or three pre-
cious relics being saved from the wreck.
Sir Thomas Bodley, a wealthy knight and
diplomatist of the time of James I., it was
who reared this pile, severely square and

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 21

bare, though a skilful variation of the
string course in the different stories some-
what relieves its heaviness. In the an-
tique reading-room, breathing study, and
not overthronged with readers, the book-
worm finds a paradise. Over the Library
is the University Gallery, the visitor to
which is entreated to avert his eyes from
the fictitious portraits of founders of early
Colleges, and to fix them, if he will, on the
royal portraits which painfully attest the
loyalty of the University, or, as a relief
from these, on Guy Fawkes's lantern.
Beneath the Library used to be the
Schools or examination-rooms of the Uni-
versity, scenes of youthful hopes and fears;
perhaps, as the aspirants to honours were

22 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

a minority, of more fears than hopes; and
at those doors formerly gathered the eager
crowd of candidates and their friends to
read the class lists which were posted
there. But the examination system has
outgrown its ancient tenement and mi-
grated to yonder new-built pile in High
Street, more fitted, perhaps, by its elabo-
rate ornamentation for the gala and the
dance, than for the torture of undergrad-
uates. In the quadrangle of the Bodleian
sits aloft, on the face of a tower displaying
all the orders of classical architecture, the
learned King and royal theologian. The
Bible held in his hand is believed to
have fallen down on the day that Mr.
Gladstone lost his election as Member

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 23

for the University of Oxford and set
forth on a career of liberalism which has
since led him to the disestablishment
of the Church. We stand on the Rad-
cliffe, formerly the medical and physical
library, now a supplement and an addi-
tional reading-room of the Bodleian, the
gift of Dr. Radcliffe, Court Physician and
despot of the profession in the times of
William and Anne, of whose rough say-
ings, and sayings more than rough, some
are preserved in his " Life." He it was
who told William III. that he would not
have His Majesty's two legs for his three
kingdoms, and who is said to have pun-
ished the giver of a niggardly fee by a
prediction of death, which was fulfilled by

24 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

the terrors of the patient. Close at hand
is the Ashmolean, the old University
Museum, now only a museum of antiqui-
ties, the most precious of which is King
Alfred's gem. Museum and Medical Li-
brary have together migrated to the new
edifice on the north side of the city.

But of all the University buildings the
most beautiful is St. Mary's Church, where
the University sermons are preached, and
from the pulpit of which, in the course of
successive generations and successive con-
troversies, a changeful and often heady
current of theology has flowed. There
preached Newman, Pusey, and Manning;
there preached Hampden, Stanley, and
the authors of " Essays and Reviews."

kUl

>

■-

o

o

h

O CO
-" X

b o
„_• uj

CO x

h

C

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 25

Oxford and Cambridge were not at
first Universities of Colleges. The Col-
leges were after-growths which for a time
absorbed the University. The University
of Oxford was born in the twelfth century,
fully a century before the foundation of
the first College. To recall the Oxford
of the thirteenth century, one must bid
vanish all the buildings which now meet
our eyes, except yonder grim castle to
the west of the city, and the stern tower
of St. Michael's Church, at once the bell
tower of the Church and a defence of
the city gate facing the dangerous north.
The man-at-arms from the castle, the war-
der from the gate, looks down upon a
city of five or six thousand inhabitants,

26 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

huddled for protection under the castle,
and within those walls of which a fine
remnant is seen bounding the domain of
New College. In this city there is a
concourse of students brought together
to hear a body of teachers who have been
led, we know not how, to open their mart
of knowledge here. Printing not having
been invented, and books being scarce,
the fountain of knowledge is the lecture-
room of the professor. It is the age of
an intellectual revival so remarkable as
to be called the Mediaeval Renaissance.
After the migrations and convulsions, by
which the world was cast in a new mould,
ensues a reign of comparative peace and
settled government, under which the de-

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 27

sire of knowledge has been reawakened.
Universities have been coining out all
over Europe like stars in the night; Paris,
famous for theology and philosophy, per-
haps being the brightest of the constella-
tion, while Bologna was famed for law
and Salerno for medicine. It was prob-
ably in the reign of Henry I. that the
company of teachers settled at Oxford,
and before the end of the thirteenth cen-
tury students had collected to a number
which fable exaggerates to thirty thousand,
but which was really large enough to
crowd the little city and even the bastions
of its walls. A light had shone on youths
who sat in the shadow of feudal servitude.
There is no more romantic period in the

28 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

history of human intellect than the thir-
teenth century.

The teachers, after the fashion of that
age, formed themselves into a guild, which
guarded its monopoly. The undergradu-
ate was the apprentice ; the degree was
a license to teach, and carried with it
the duty of teaching, though in time it
became a literary title, unconnected with
teaching, and coveted for its own sake.
The University obtained a charter, elected
its Chancellor, formed its academical Leg-
islature of graduates, obtained jurisdiction
over its own members. In time it mar-
shalled its teachers and students into
regular Faculties of theology, law, and
medicine, with arts, or general and liberal

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 29

culture, if the name can be applied to
anything so rudimentary as the literature
and science of that day, forming the basis
of all. At first the professors taught
where they could ; in the cloisters, per-
haps, of St. Frydeswide's monastery, sub-
sequently absorbed by Christ Church; in
the porches of houses. A row of lecture-
rooms, called the Schools, was afterwards
provided in School Street, which ran north
and south just under the Radcliffe. So
little anchored was the University by
buildings, that when maltreated at Oxford
it was ready to pack up its literary wares
and migrate to another city such as
Northampton or Stamford. Many of the
undergraduates at first were mere boys,

30 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

to whom the University was a grammar
school. For the real University students
the dominant study was that of the School
philosophy, logical and philosophical, with
its strange metaphysical jargon ; an im-
mense attempt to extract knowledge from
consciousness by syllogistic reasoning, in-
stead of gathering it from observation,
experience, and research, mocking by its
barrenness of fruit the faith of the enthu-
siastic student, yet training the mind to
preternatural acuteness, and perhaps form-
ing a necessary stage in the mental educa-
tion of the race. The great instrument
of high education was disputation, often
repeated, and conducted with the most
elaborate forms in the tournaments of the

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 31

Schools, which might beget readiness of
wit and promptness of elocution, but could
hardly beget habits of calm investigation
or paramount love of truth. The great
event in the academical life was Incep-
tion, when the student performed exercises
which inaugurated his teachership; and
this was commonly celebrated by a feast,
the expenditure on which the University
was called upon to restrain. Oxford pro-
duced some of the greatest schoolmen:
Duns Scotus, the "subtle," who had
written thirteen folio volumes of arid
metaphysics before his early death; Brad-
wardine, the "profound," and Ockham,
the " invincible and unmatched." The
idol was Aristotle, viewed mainly as the

32 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

metaphysician, and imperfectly understood
through translations. To reconcile Aris-
totelian speculation with orthodox theology
was a hard task, not always successfully
performed. Theology was, of course, first
in dignity of the Faculties, but the most
lucrative was the civil and canon law
practised in the ecclesiastical courts and,
as Roman, misliked by the patriotic Par-
liament. Philosophy complained that it
had to trudge afoot while the liegemen
of Justinian rode high in the car of pre-
ferment. Of physical science the hour
was not yet come, but before its hour
came its wonderful and almost miraculous
precursor, Roger Bacon, who anticipated
the invention of gunpowder and the tele-

oo

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 66

scope, and whose fabled study stood over
Folly Bridge, till, with Carfax's monument
and Cranmer's prison, it was cleared away
by an improving city corporation. Roger
Bacon was, of course, taken for a dealer in
black arts ; an astrologer and an alchemist
he was, and at the same time an illustrious
example of the service indirectly rendered
by astrology and alchemy in luring to an
investigation of nature which led to real
discoveries, just as Columbus, seeking a
western passage to the golden cities of the
East, discovered America.

All the Universities belonged not to one
nation but to Latin Christendom, the edu-
cated population of which circulated among

34 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

them. At one time there was a migration
to Oxford from the University of Paris,
which had got into trouble with the gov-
ernment. Of all the Universities alike, ec-
clesiastical Latin was the language. The
scholars all ranked with the clerical order,
so that at Oxford, scholar and clerk, towns-
man and layman, were convertible terms.
In those days all intellectual callings, and
even the higher mechanical arts, were
clerical. The student was exempted by
his tonsure from lay jurisdiction. The Pa-
pacy anxiously claimed the Universities
as parts of its realm, and only degrees
granted by the Pope's authority were cur-
rent throughout Christendom. When,
with Edward III., came the long war

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 35

between England and France, and when
the confederation of Latin Christendom
was beginning to break up, the English
Universities grew more national.

Incorporated with the buildings of Wor-
cester College are some curious little tene-
ments once occupied by a colony from
different Benedictine Monasteries. These,
with the Church of St. Frydeswide, now
Christ Church Cathedral, and the small
remains of Osney Abbey, are about the
only relics of monastic Oxford which sur-
vived the Reformation. But in the Middle
Ages there were Houses for novices of the
great Orders, Benedictines, Cistercians,
Carmelites, Augustinians,and most notable

36 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

and powerful of all, the two great mendi-
cant Orders of Dominicans and Francis-
cans. The Mendicants, who came into
the country angels of humility as well as
of asceticism, begging their bread, and
staining the ground with the blood from
their shoeless feet, soon changed their
character, and began in the interest of
Holy Church to grasp power and amass
wealth. The Franciscans especially, like
the Jesuits of an after day, strove to master
the centres of intellectual influence. They
strove to put the laws of the University
under their feet. Struggles between them
and the seculars, with appeals to the Crown,
were the consequence. Attraction of cal-
low youth to an angelic life seems to have

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 37

been characteristic of the Brethren of St.
Francis, and it is conjectured that in this
way Bacon became a monk. Faintly pat-
ronised by a liberal and lettered Pope, he
was arraigned for necromancy by his Order,
and ended his days in gloom, if not in a
monastic prison. The Church of the
Middle Ages with one hand helped to
open the door of knowledge, with the other
she sought to close it. At last she sought
to close it with both hands, and in her
cruel panic established the Inquisition.

Tory in its later days, the University
was liberal in its prime. It took the part
of the Barons and De Montfort against
Henry III., and a corps of its students

38 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

fought against the King under their own
banner at Northampton. Instead of being
the stronghold of reaction, it was the focus
of active, even of turbulent aspiration, and
the saying ran, that when there was fight-
ing at Oxford there was war in England.
Oxford's hero in the thirteenth century
wras its Chancellor, Grosseteste, the friend
of De Montfort and the great reformer of
his day, " of prelates the rebuker, of monks
the corrector, of scholars the instructor,
of the people the preacher, of the inconti-
nent the chastiser, of writings the in-
dustrious investigator, of the Romans the
hammer and contemner." If Grosseteste
patronised the Friars, it was in their
first estate.

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 39

At first the students lodged as " Cham-
berdekyns " with citizens, but that system
proving dangerous to order, they were
gathered into hostels, or, to use the more
dignified name, Halls (aula) under a Prin-
cipal, or Master of the University, who
boarded and governed them. Of these
Halls there were a great number, with
their several names and signs. Till lately
a few of them remained, though these had
lost their original character, and become
merely small Colleges, without any foun-
dation except a Principal. The students
in those days were mostly poor. Their
indigence was almost taken for granted.
Some of them begged ; chests were pro-
vided by the charitable for loans to them.

40 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

A poor student's life was hard ; if he was
earnest in study, heroic. He shared a
room with three or four chums, he slept
under a rug, his fare was coarse and
scanty, his garment was the gown which
has now become merely an academical
symbol, and thankful he was to be pro-
vided with a new one. He had no fire in
his room, no glass in his window. As his
exercises in the University Schools began
at five in the morning, it is not likely that
he read much at night, otherwise he would
have to read by the light of a feeble lamp
flickering with the wind. His manuscript
was painful to read. The city was filthy,
the water polluted with sewage; pesti-
lence often swept through the crowded
hive.

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 41

Mediaeval students were a rough set;
not less rough than enthusiastic ; rougher
than the students of the Quartier Latin or
Heidelberg, their nearest counterparts in
recent times. They wore arms, or kept
them in their chambers, and they needed
them not only in going to and from the
University over roads beset with robbers,
but in conflicts with the townspeople, with
whom the University was at war. With
the townspeople the students had desperate
affrays, ancient precursors of the compara-
tively mild town and gown rows of this
century. The defiant horns of the town
were answered by the bells of the Univer-
sity. Arrows flew; blood was shed on
both sides ; Halls were stormed and de-

42 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

fended ; till Royalty from Abingdon or
Woodstock interfered with its men-at-arms,
seconded by the Bishop with bell, book,
and candle. A Papal Legate, an Italian
on whom national feeling looks with jeal-
ousy, comes to Oxford. Scholars crowd to
see him. There is a quarrel between them
and his train. His cook flings a cauldron
of boiling broth over an Irish student. The
scholars fly to arms. The Legate is igno-
miniously chased from Oxford. Excom-
munications, royal thunders, and penitential
performances follow. Jews settle in Oxford,
ply their trade among the scholars, and
form a quarter with invidiously wealthy
mansions. There is a royal edict, forbid-
ding them to exact more than forty-three

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 43

per cent interest from the student. Wealth
makes them insolent; they assault a relig-
ious procession, and with them also the
students have affrays. Provincial feeling
is strong, for the students are divided into
two nations, the Northern and the South-
ern, which are always wrangling, and some-
times fight pitched battles with bows and
arrows. The two Proctors, now the heads
of University police, were appointed as
tribunes of the two nations to settle elec-
tions and other matters between them
without battle. Amusements as well as
everything else were rude. Football and
other rough games were played at Beau-
mont, a piece of ground to the north of
the city; but there was nothing like that

44 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

cricket field in the parks, nor like the sen-
sation now created by the appearance of a
renowned cricketer in his paddings before
an admiring crowd, to display the fruit of
his many years of assiduous practice in
guarding his stumps. The Crown and
local lords had to complain of a good deal
of poaching in Bagley, Woodstock, Shot-
over, and Stowe Wood.

To this Oxford, with its crowd of youth
thirsting for knowledge, its turbulence, its
vice, its danger from monkish encroach-
ment, came Walter de Merton, one of the
same historic group as Grosseteste and
Grosseteste's friend, Adam de Marisco,
the man of the hour, with the right device

2
o
a:
u.

uf
o
u

_i

□
o

z

o

H

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 45

in his mind. Merton had been Chancellor
of Henry III. amidst the political storms
of the time, from which he would gladly
turn aside to a work of peaceful improve-
ment. It was thus that violence in those
ages paid with its left hand a tribute to
civilisation. Merton's foundation is the
first College, though University and Bal-
liol come before it in the Calendar in
deference to the priority of the benefac-
tions out of which those Colleges grew.
Yonder noble chapel in the Decorated
style, with its tower and the old quad-
rangle beneath it, called, nobody knows
why, Mob Quad, are the cradle of College
life. Merton's plan was an academical
brotherhood, which combined monastic

46 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

order, discipline, and piety with the pur-
suit of knowledge. No monk or friar was
ever to be admitted to his House. The
members of the House are called in his
statutes by the common name of Scholars,
that of Fellows (Socii), which afterwards
prevailed here and in all the other Col-
leges, denoting their union as an aca-
demical household. They were to live
like monks in common ; they were to take
their meals together in the Refectory, and
to study together in the common library,
which may still be seen, dark and austere,
with the chain by which a precious volume
was attached to the desk. They had not
a common dormitory, but they must have
slept two or three in a room. Probably

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 47

they were confined to their quadrangle,
except when they were attending the
Schools of the University, or allowed to
leave it only with a companion as a safe-
guard. They were to elect their own
Warden, and fill up by election vacancies
in their own number. The Warden
whom they had elected, they were to
obey. They were to watch over each
other's lives, and hold annual scrutinies
into conduct. The Archbishop of Can-
terbury was to visit the College and see
that the rule was kept. But the rule was
moral and academical, not cloistral or
ascetic. The mediaeval round of religious
services was to be duly performed, and
prayers were to be said for the Founder's

48 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

soul. But the main object was not prayer,
contemplation, or masses for souls ; it was
study. Monks were permanently devoted
to their Order, shut up for life in their
monastery, and secluded from the world.
The Scholars of Merton were destined to
serve the world, into which they were to
go forth when they had completed the
course of preparation in their College.
They were destined to serve the world
as their Founder had served it. In fact,
we find Wardens and Fellows of Merton
employed by the State and the Church in
important missions. A Scholar of Mer-
ton, though he was to obey the College
authorities, took no monastic vow of obe-
dience. He took no monastic vow of

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 49

poverty; on the contrary, it was antici-
pated that he would gain wealth, of which
he was exhorted to bestow a portion on
his College. He took no monastic vow
of celibacy, though, as one of the clerical
order, he would of course not be permitted
to marry. He was clerical as all Scholars
in those days were clerical, not in the
modern and professional sense of the term.
The allowances of the Fellow were only
his Commons, or food, and his Livery, or
raiment, and there were to be as many
Fellows as the estate could provide with
these. Instruction was received not in
College, but in the Schools of the Univer-
sity, to which the Scholars of Merton, like
the other Scholars, were to resort. A

E

50 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

sort of grammar school, for boys of the
Founder's kin, was attached to the Col-
lege. But otherwise the work of the Col-
lege was study, not tuition, nor did the
statutes contemplate the admission of any
members except those on the foundation.

Merton's plan, meeting the need of
the hour, found acceptance. His College
became the pattern for others both at
Oxford and Cambridge. University, Bal-
liol, Exeter, Oriel, and Queen's were mod-
elled after it, and monastic Orders seem
to have taken the hint in founding Houses
for their novices at Oxford. University
College grew out of the benefaction of
William of Durham, an ecclesiastic who

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 51

had studied at Paris, and left the Univer-
sity a sum of money for the maintenance
of students of divinity. The University
lodged them in a Hall styled the Great
Hall of the University, which is still the
proper corporate name of the College.
In after days, this Hall, having grown
into a College, wished to slip its neck out
of the visitorial yoke of the University,
and on the strength of its beino: the oldest
foundation at Oxford, claimed as founder
Alfred, to whom the foundation of the
University was ascribed by fable, asserting
that as a royal foundation it was under
the visitorship of the Crown. Courts of
law recognised the claim ; a Hanoverian
court of law probably recognised it with

52 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

pleasure, as transferring power from a
Tory University to the King; and thus
was consecrated a fiction in palliation of
which it can only be said, that the earliest
of our literary houses may not improperly
be dedicated to the restorer of English
learning. Oriel was founded by a court
Almoner, Adam de Brome, who displayed
his courtliness by allowing his Scholars to
speak French as well as Latin. Queen's
was founded by a court Chaplain, Robert
Egglesfleld, and dedicated to the honour
of his royal mistress, Queen Philippa.
It was for a Provost and twelve Fellows
who were to represent the number of
Christ and his disciples, to sit at a table
as Egglesfield had seen in a picture

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 53

the Thirteen sitting at the Last Supper,
though in crimson robes. Egglesfield's
building has been swept away to make
room for the Palladian palace on its site.
But his name is kept in mind by the
quaint custom of giving, on his day, a
needle (aiguille) to each member of the
foundation, with the injunction, Take that
and be thrifty. Yonder stone eagles too
on the buildino- recall it. Exeter College
was the work of a political Bishop who
met his death in a London insurrection.

As the fashion of founding Colleges
grew, that of founding Monasteries de-
creased, and the more as the mediaeval
faith declined, and the great change drew
near. That change was heralded by the

54 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

appearance of Wycliffe, a genuine off-
spring of the University, for while he was
the great religious reformer, he was also
the great scholastic philosopher of his
day. To what College or Hall his name
and fame belong is a moot point among
antiquaries. We would fain imagine him
in his meditations pacing the old Mob
Quadrangle of Merton. His teaching
took strong and long hold of the Univer-
sity. His reforming company of "poor
priests " drew with it the spiritual aspira-
tion and energy of Oxford youth. But if
his movement has left any traces in the
shape of foundations, it is in the shape
of foundations produced by the reaction
against it, and destined for its overthrow.

NEW COLLEGE. CLOISTERS AND TOWER.

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 55

Yonder rises the bell tower of New
College over a famous group of build-
ings, with ample quadrangle, rich religious
chapel, a noble Hall and range of tranquil
cloisters, defaced only by the addition of
a modern upper story to the quadrangle
and Vandalic adaptation of the upper
windows to modern convenience. This
pile was the work of William of Wyke-
ham, Bishop of Winchester, a typical
character of the Middle Ages, prelate,
statesman, and court architect in one,
who negotiated the peace of Bretigny and
built Windsor Castle. The eye of the
great architect as well as of the pious
Founder must have ranged with delight
over his fair creation. It is likely that

06 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

New College, as a foundation highly re-
ligious in its character, was intended to
counteract Wycliffism as well as to replen-
ish the clergy which had been decimated
by the Black Death. Wykeham was a
reformer in his way, and one of the party
headed by the Black Prince which strove
to correct the abuses of the court in the
dark decline of Edward III. But he was
a conservative, religious after the ortho-
dox fashion, and devoted to the worship
of the Virgin, to whom his College was
dedicated, after whom it was named, and
whose image surmounts its gate. The
College of St. Mary of Winton his foun-
dation was entitled. In its day it might
well be called New College. New it

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 57

was in its scale, having seventy Fellows
and Scholars besides ten Chaplains, three
Clerks, and sixteen Choristers for the ser-
vices of the Chapel, which is still famous
for its choir. New it was in the extent
and magnificence of its buildings. New
it was in the provision made for solemn
services in its Chapel, for religious pro-
cessions round its cloisters, for the daily-
orisons of all its members. New it was
in the state assigned to its Warden, who
was not to be like the Warden of Merton,
only the first among his humble peers,
living with them at the common board,
but to resemble more a great Abbot with
a separate establishment of his own, keep-
ing a sumptuous hospitality and drawn by

58 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

six horses when he went abroad. New it
was in having undergraduates as well as
graduates on the foundation, and provid-
ing for the training of the youth during
the whole interval between school and the
highest University degree. Even further
back than the time of admittance to
the University, stretched the care of the
reformer of education. The most import-
ant novelty of all, perhaps, in his creation,
was the connection between his College
and the school which he founded at Win-
chester, his cathedral city, to feed his
College with a constant supply of model
Scholars. This was the first of those
great Public Schools which have largely
moulded the character of the ruling class

NEW COLLEGE CHAPEL.

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 59

in England. The example was followed
by Henry VI. in connecting King's Col-
lege, Cambridge, with Eton, and would
have been followed by Wolsey had he
carried out his design of connecting Car-
dinal College with his school at Ipswich.
From the admission of an undergraduate
element into the College it naturally fol-
lowed that there should be instruction
of the juniors by the seniors, and super-
intendence of study within the College
walls. This was yet another novelty, and
Wykeham seems to have had an addi-
tional motive for adopting it in the low
condition of the University Schools, from
the exercises of which attention had per-
haps been diverted by the religious move-

60 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

ment. In the careful provision for the
study of Grammatica, that is, the elements
of Latin, we perhaps see a gleam of the
Renaissance, as the style of the buildings
belonging to the last order of mediaeval
architecture indicates that the Middle Age
was hastening to its close. But it was one
of Wykeham's objects to strengthen the
orthodox priesthood in a time of revolu-
tionary peril. Ten of his Fellows were
assigned to the study of civil, ten to that
of canon, law. Two were permitted to
study medicine. All the rest were to be
theologians. The Founder was false to
his own generous design in giving a para-
mount and perpetual preference in the
election of Fellows to his own kin, who,

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 61

being numerous, became at length a fear-
ful incubus on his institution. It is not
likely that his own idea of kinship was
unlimited, or extended beyond the tenth
decree. All the Fellows and Scholars
were to be poor and indigent. This was
in unison with the mediaeval spirit of alms-
giving as well as with the mediaeval theory
of poverty as a state spiritually superior,
held, though not embodied, by wealthy
prelates. Study, not teaching, it is always
to be remembered, was the principal duty
of those who were to eat the Founder's
bread.

The Statutes of New College are elabo-
rate, and were largely copied by other

62 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

founders. They present to us a half-
monastic life, with the general hue of
asceticism which pervades everything me-
diaeval. Here, as in the case of Merton,
there are no vows, but there is strict dis-
cipline, with frugal fare. The Commons,
or allowances for food, are not to exceed
twelve pence per week, except in the times
of dearth. Once a year there is an allow-
ance of cloth for a gown. There is a chest
for loans to the very needy, but there is no
stipend. The Warden rules with abbatial
power, though in greater matters he re-
quires the consent of the Fellows, and is
himself under the censorship of the Visitor,
the Bishop of Winchester, who, however,
rarely interposed. Every year he goes on

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 63

" progress " to view the College estates,
there being in those days no agents, and
is received by tenants with homage and
rural hospitality. The Fellows and Schol-
ars are lodged three or four in a room, the
seniors as monitors to the juniors. Each
Scholar undergoes two years of probation.
As in a baronial hall the nobles, so in the
College Hall the seniors, occupy the dais,
or high table, while the juniors sit at
tables arranged down the Hall. In the
dining-hall the Fellows and Scholars sit
in silence, and listen to the reading of the
Bible. In speaking they must use no
tongue but the Latin. There is to be no
lingering in the Hall after dinner, except
when in winter a fire is lighted on some

64 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

church festival. Then it is permitted to
remain awhile and rehearse poems, or talk
about the chronicles of the kingdom, the
wonders of the world, and other things be-
fitting clerical discourse. This seems to
be the principal concession made to the
youthful love of amusement. As a rule,
it appears that the students were confined
to the College and its cloisters when they
were not attending the Schools of the
University. They are forbidden to keep
hounds or hawks, as well as to throw stones
or indulge in any rough or noisy sports.
The injunctions against spilling wine and
slops in the upper rooms, or beer on the
floor of the Hall, to the annoyance of those
who lodged beneath, betoken a rough style

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 65

of living and rude manners. The admis-
sion of strangers is jealously restricted, and
on no account must a woman enter the
College, except a laundress, who must be
of safe age. There were daily prayers for
the Founder's soul, daily masses, and fifty
times each day every member of the College
was to repeat the salutation to the Virgin.
The Founder's obit was to be celebrated
with special pomp. Self-love in a me-
diaeval ascetic was not annihilated by
humility, though it took a religious form.
Thrice every year are held scrutinies into
life and conduct, at which the hateful
practice of secret denunciation is admitted,
and the accused is forbidden to call for the
name of his accuser. Every cloistered soci-

66 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

ety, whether monastic or academic, is pretty
sure to seethe with cabals, suspicions, and
slanders. Leave of absence from the Col-
lege was by statute very sparingly allowed,
and seldom could the young Scholar pay
what, in the days before the letter post,
must have been angel's visits to the old
people on the paternal homestead. The
ecclesiastical and ascetic system of the
Middle Ages had little regard for domestic
affection. It treated the boy as entirely a
child of the Church. In times of pesti-
lence, then common, the inmates of the
Colleges usually went to some farm or
grange belonging to the College in the
neighbourhood of Oxford, and those were
probably pleasant days for the younger

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 67

members. Oaths of fearful length and
stringency were taken to the observation
of the statutes. They proved sad traps for
conscience when the statutes had become
obsolete, a contingency of which the Found-
ers, ignorant of progress and evolution,
never dreamed.

In the interval between the foundation
of New College and the revolution, re-
ligious and intellectual, which we call the
Reformation, were founded Lincoln, All
Souls', Magdalen, and Brasenose. Lin-
coln, All Souls', and Brasenose lie imme-
diately round us, close to what was the
centre of academical life. Magdalen we
recognise in the distance by the most

68 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

beautiful of towers. Lincoln was theo-
logical, and was peculiar in being con-
nected with two of the Churches of
Oxford, which its members served, and
the tithes and oblations of which formed
its endowment. Its Founder, Fleming,
Bishop of Lincoln, had as a graduate
resident at Oxford been noted for sym-
pathy with the Wycliffites. But when
he became Bishop of Lincoln, the fact
dawned upon him that the Scriptures
too freely interpreted were dangerous.
He went over to the Reaction, burned
Wycliffe's body, and determined to found
a little college of true students in theol-
ogy, who w7ould " defend the mysteries
of the sacred page against those igno-

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 69

rant laics who profaned with swinish
snouts its most holy pearls." His suc-
cessor, Bishop Rotherham, being of the
same mind, carried forward the work,
and gave the College statutes enjoining
the expulsion of any Fellow convicted of
favouring in public or in private hereti-
cal tenets, and in particular the tenets
of " that heretical sect lately sprung up
which assails the sacraments, diverse
orders and dignities, and properties of
the Church." Rotherham had evidently
a keen and just sense of the fact, that
with the talismanic sacraments of the
Church were bound up its dignity and
wealth. The two orthodox prelates would
have stood aghast if they could have fore-

70 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

seen that their little College of true theo-
logians would one day number among its
Fellows John Wesley, and that Method-
ism would be cradled within its walls.
They would not less have stood aghast
if they could have foreseen that such a
chief of Liberals as Mark Pattison, would
one day be its Rector. The history of
these foundations is full of lessons for
benefactors who fancy that they can im-
press their will upon posterity.

All Souls' was designed by its Founder,
Archbishop Chicheley, ad orandum as
well as ad studendum ; it was to serve
the purpose of a chantry not less than
of a College. The sculptured group of
souls over the gateway in High Street

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 71

denotes that the Warden and Fellows
were to pray for the souls of all Chris-
tian people. But particularly were they
to pray for the souls of " the illustrious
Prince Henry, late King of England, of
Thomas, Duke of Clarence, and of all
the Dukes, Earls, Barons, Knights, Es-
quires, and others who fell in the war
for the Crown of France." Of that
unhappy war Chicheley had been the
adviser; and seeing the wreck which his
folly, or, if the suspicion immortalised
by Shakespeare is true, his selfish policy,
as the head of a bloated Establishment
threatened with depletion, had wrought,
he may well have felt the sting of con-
science in his old age. The figures in

72 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

the new reredos of the Chapel tell the
story of the foundation.

Magdalen was the work of Waynflete,
Bishop of Winchester and Chancellor of
Henry VI., another statesman-prelate who
turned from the political storm to found
a house of learning. Of all the houses
of learning in England, perhaps of any
country, that which Waynflete founded is
the loveliest, as he will say who stands
in its cloistered and ivy-mantled quad-
rangle, either beneath the light of the
summer's sun or that of the winter's
moon. Some American architect, capti-
vated by the graces of Magdalen, has
reproduced them in his plan for a new

h

rt

LL

o

J

D

Uu

>-

[i.

m

z

<u

X

1

o

o
U

H

c

W

u

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 73

University in California. Those courts,
when newly built, were darkened by
the presence of Richard III. Waynflete
came to Oxford to receive the king; and
this homage, paid by a saintly man, seems
to show that in those fierce times of dynas-
tic change, Richard, before the murder of
his nephews, was not regarded as a crimi-
nal usurper, perhaps not as a usurper at
all. The tyrant was intellectual. In him,
as still more notably in Tiptoft, Earl of
Worcester, nicknamed for his cruelty the
Butcher, but literary and a benefactor to
the University, was something like an
English counterpart of the mixture in
the Italian Renaissance of culture with
licentiousness and crime. But as he sat

74 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

beside Waynflete in the Hall wooing pop-
ularity by apparent attention to the exer-
cises, Richard's thoughts probably were
far away. A red rose among the archi-
tectural ornaments is found to have been
afterwards painted white. It changed, no
doubt, with fortune, when she left the red
for the white rose. A new relation be-
tween College and University is inaugu-
rated by the institution at Magdalen of
three Readers to lecture to the Univer-
sity at large.

The old quadrangle of Brasenose re-
mains much as it was left by its co-
founders, a munificent Bishop and a
pious Knight. It is of no special his-

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 75

toric interest, and its importance belongs
to later times. It absorbed several Halls,
the sign of one of which was probably
the brazen nose which now adorns its
gate, and so far it marks an epoch.

The quiet and sombre old quadrangle
of Corpus Christi lies yonder, by the side
of Merton, much as its Founder left it.
Now we have come to the real dawn of
the English Renaissance, a gray dawn
which never became a very bright day;
for in England, as in Germany and other
Teutonic countries, reawakened and eman-
cipated intellect turned to the pursuit of
truth rather than of beauty, and the great
movement was less a birth of literature

76 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

and of art than of reformation in religion.
This is the age of Grocyn, the teacher
of Greek ; of Linacre, the English Hippoc-
rates ; of Colet, the regenerator of educa-
tion; of Sir Thomas More, who carried
culture to the Chancellorship of the realm,
and whose " Utopia "proclaims the growth
of fresh aspirations and the opening of a
new era in one way, as Rabelais did in
another. Duke Humphrey of Gloucester,
uncle of Henry VI., had perhaps opened
the epoch at Oxford by his princely gift
of books, in which the Renaissance litera-
ture was strongly represented, and which
was the germ of the University Library.
Soon Erasmus will visit Oxford and chant
in elegant Latin the praises of the classi-

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 77

cal and cultured circle which he finds
there. Now rages the war between the
humanists of the new classical learning,
called the Greeks, and its opponents,
the Trojans, who desired to walk in the
ancient paths, and who, though bigoted
and grotesque, were, after all, not far
wrong in identifying heresy with Greek,
since the study of the New Testament in
the original was subversive of the medi-
aeval faith. Again, as in the cases of
Merton, Wykeham, and Waynflete, a
statesman-prelate turns in old age from the
distractions of State to found a house of
learning. Foxe, Bishop of Winchester,
was the chief counsellor and diplomatist of
Heniy VII., in whose service he had no

78 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

doubt passed anxious hours and trodden
dark paths. It may have been partly for
the good of his soul that he proposed to
found a house in Oxford for the reception
of young monks from St. Swithin's Priory
in Winchester while studying in Oxford.
He was diverted from that design, and
persuaded to found a College instead, by
his friend Hugh Oldham, Bishop of Exe-
ter, who is represented as saying, " What,
my Lord, shall we build houses and pro-
vide livelihoods for a company of bussing
monks whose end and fall we ourselves
may live to see ? No, no. It is more
meet, a great deal, that we should have
care to provide for the increase of learning
and for such as by their learning shall do

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 79

good in the Church and Commonwealth."
Supposing the prognostication embodied
in these words genuine, they show that to
an enlightened Bishop the dissolution of
the Monasteries seemed inevitable. The
statutes of Foxe's College are written in a
style which affects the highest classical
elegance. They elaborate throughout the
metaphor of a bee-hive with its industrious
insects and its store of intellectual honey.
They embody the hopes of the Renais-
sance and depict a College of the Human-
ities. There is to be a Reader in Greek,
and for the subjects of his lectures a long
list of great Greek authors is assigned.
There is to be a Reader of Latin, for
whose lectures a similar list of Latin au-

80 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

thors is given, and who is to keep " bar-
barism," that mortal sin in the eyes of a
devotee of the Renaissance, out of the
hive. Theology is not forgotten. The
Founder pays a due, possibly somewhat
conventional, tribute to its surpassing
importance. Of this, also, there is a
Professor, but its guides in interpreting
Scripture are not to be the mediaeval text-
books, such as Aquinas and the Master of
the Sentences, but the Greek and Latin
Fathers, including the daring Origen and
Augustine the favourite of Luther. The
Readers are to lecture not to the College
only, but to the University at large, a new
provision, connecting the College with the
University, which hardly took effect till

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 81

very recent times. One of the first Read-
ers was the learned Spaniard, Juan Luis
Vives, whose appointment bespoke the
cosmopolitan character of the humanist
republic of letters. The statutes were
signed by the Founder with a trembling
hand eight months before his death, so
that only in imagination did he see his
literary bees at work.

Yonder to the south is Tom Tower,
where hangs the great bell, which, " swing-
ing slow with sullen roar," was heard by
Milton at Forest Hill. It was tolled a
hundred and one times for the hundred
and one students of Wolsey's House.
The Tower, or Cupola, was the work, not

G

82 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

of Wolsey but of Wren. Around the
great quadrangle over which it rises are
seen the lines for cloisters which were
never built. The balustrade on the top
of the quadrangle is an alien work of
modern times. The Church of St. Fry-
deswide's Monastery does duty as the
College Chapel, in place of the grand
Chapel in the perpendicular style, which,
had the Founder's plan taken effect, would
have stood there. Moreover, that which
should have been wholly a College is
made to serve and to expend a part of
its power as the Chapter of the Diocese
of Oxford, lending its Chapel as the
Cathedral, a niggardly arrangement which
has been productive of strained relations

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 83

between occupants of the See and Heads
of the College. Ample and noble are the
courts of Wolsey. Worthy of his mag-
nificence is the great Hall, the finest
room, barring Westminster Hall, in Eng-
land, and filled with those portraits of
Alumni, which, notwithstanding the fre-
quency of pudding sleeves, form the fairest
tapestry with which hall was ever hung.
But it all falls short of Wolsey's concep-
tion. Had Wolsey's conception been ful-
filled, Ipswich would have been a nursery
of scholars for Cardinal College, as Win-
chester was for New College, and Eton
for King's College, Cambridge. The Car-
dinal was an English Leo X. in morals,
tastes, perhaps in beliefs; a true Prince,

84 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

not of the Church but of the Renaissance.
For him, perhaps, as for Foxe, it was a
refreshment to turn from public life, full,
as it must have been, of care and peril for
the Vizier of a headstrong and capricious
despot, to the calm happiness of seeing
his great College rise, and gathering into
it the foremost of teachers and the flower
of students. But in the midst of his
enterprise the sky of the Renaissance
became overcast with clouds, and the
storm of religious revolution, which had
long been gathering, broke. Forewarn-
ings of the storm Wolsey had received, for
he had found that in opening his gates
to the highest intellectual activity he had
opened them to free inquiry and to hetero-

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 85

doxy. Himself, too, had set the example
of suppressing monasteries, though he did
this not for mere rapine or to gorge his
parasites, but to turn useless and abused
endowments to a noble use. Wolsey all
but drew his foundation down with him
in his fall. The tyrant and his minions
were builders of nothing but ruin. Christ
Church, as at last it was called, was threat-
ened with confiscation and destruction,
but was finally spared in its incomplete
condition, appropriated by Henry as his
own foundation, and dedicated to the
honour of the king, whose portrait, in
its usual attitude of obtrusive self-conceit,
occupies in the Hall the central place,
where the portrait of the Cardinal should

86 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

be. The Cardinal's hat, on the outer wall
of the house, is left to speak of the true
Founder. That the College was to be
called after its Founder's name, not, like
the Colleges of Wykeham and Waynflete,
after the name of a Saint, seems a symp-
tom of the pride which went before
Wolsey's fall.

Now come upon the hapless University
forty years of religious revolution, the
monuments of which are traces of de-
struction and records of proscription. All
the monastic houses and houses for mon-
astic novices were forfeited to the Crown,
and their buildings were left desolate,
though, from the ruins of some of them,

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 87

new Colleges were afterwards to rise.
Libraries which would now be priceless,
were sacked and destroyed because the
illumination on the manuscripts was Pop-
ish. It was the least to be deplored of
all the havoc, that the torn leaves of the
arid tomes of Duns Scotus were seen
flying about the quadrangle of New Col-
lege, while a sporting gentleman of the
neighbourhood was picking them up to
be used in driving the deer. There is a
comic monument of the religious revolu-
tion in the coffer shrine at Christ Church,
in which the dust of Catherine, wife of
the Protestant Doctor, Peter Martyr, is
mingled with that of the Catholic Saint,
Frydeswide. Catholicism, in its hour of

88 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

triumph under Mary, had dug up the
corpse of the heretic's concubine and
buried it under a dung-hill. Protestant-
ism, once more victorious, rescued the
remains, and guarded against a repetition
of the outrage, in case fortune should
again change, by mingling them with
those of the Catholic Saint. A more
tragic memorial of the conflict is yonder
recumbent cross in Broad Street, close
to the spot, then a portion of the town
ditch, where Cranmer, Latimer, and Rid-
ley died. Bocardo, the prison over the
neighbouring gate of the city, from the
window of which Cranmer, then confined
there, witnessed the burning of Latimer
and Ridley, was pulled down at the begin-

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 89

ning of this century. The Divinity
School, Christ Church Cathedral, and
St. Mary's Church witnessed different
scenes of the drama. St. Mary's wit-
nessed that last scene, in which Cranmer
filled his enemies with fury and confusion
by suddenly recanting his recantation,
and declaring that the hand which had
signed it should burn first. College ar-
chives record the expulsion, readmission,
and re-expulsion of Heads and Fellows,
as victory inclined to the Protestant or
Catholic side. So perished the English
Renaissance. For the cultivation of the
humanities there could be no room in a
centre of religious strife.

90 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

Fatal bequests of the religious war were
the religious tests. Leicester, as Chancel-
lor, introduced subscription to the Thirty-
nine Articles to keep out Romanists ;
King James, that to the three articles of
the Thirty-sixth Canon to keep out Puri-
tans. These tests, involving scores of
controverted propositions in theology,
were imposed on the consciences of mere
boys. The Universities were thus taken
from the nation and given to the State
Church, which, in the course of time, as dis-
sent from its doctrines gained ground, came
to be far from identical with the nation.

In the first lull, however, new Colleges
arose, partly out of the ruins of the monas-

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 91

tic houses of the past. Trinity College,
of which the quiet old quadrangle is curi-
ously mated with a fantastic Chapel of
much later date, was founded out of the
ruin of Durham College, a Benedictine
House. Its Founder, Sir Thomas Pope,
was one of that group of highly educated
lay statesmen, eminent both in the coun-
cils of kings and among the patrons of
learning, which succeeded the great Prel-
ates of the Middle Ages. He was a
Catholic, as his statutes show; but a lib-
eral Catholic, not unfriendly to light,
though little knowing perhaps whither it
would lead him. Among his friends was
Sir Nicholas Bacon, who bequeathed to
him the splendid whistle, then used to call

92 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

servants, which is seen round his neck in
his portrait. Another of his friends was
Pole, who showed his intellectual liberality
by recommending him to enjoin in his
statutes the study of Greek. St. John's
College, again, rose out of the wreck of
a Bernardine House. The Founder was
not a statesman or a prelate, but a great
citizen, Sir Thomas White, sometime
Lord Mayor of London, who had amassed
wealth in trade, and made a noble use of
it. White also was of the olden faith.
That the storm was not over when his
College was founded is tragically shown
by the fate of Campion, who, when White
was laid in the College Chapel, preached
the funeral sermon, and afterwards becom-

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 93

ing a Jesuit and an emissary of his Order,
was brought to the rack and to the scaf-
fold. There was also a great secession of
Fellows when the final rupture took place
between Rome and Elizabeth. In the
group of cultivated Knights and states-
men, who patronised learning and educa-
tion, may be placed Sir William Petre, the
second Founder of Exeter College, whose
monument is its old quadrangle, and Sir
Thomas Bodley, whose monument is the
Bodleian Library. If Petre and Bodley
were Protestants, while Pope and White
were Catholics, the difference was rather
political than religious. In religion the
public men changed with the national
government, little sharing the passions of
either theological party.

94 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

Jesus, whose old quadrangle, chapel,
and hall belong to early Stuart times, was
the first distinctly Protestant College.
This its name, in contrast with Colleges
named after Saints, denotes. The second
Protestant College was Wadham, the
buildings of which stand in their pristine
beauty, vying with Magdalen, perhaps
even excelling it in the special air of a
house of learning, and proving that to
be interesting and impressive it is not
necessary to be mediaeval. At the same
time Wadham shows how long the spirit
of the Middle Ages clung to Oxford ;
for the style of the Chapel is anterior
by a century and a half to the date.
Here we have a conscious desire, on the

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 95

part of the architect, to recall the past.
The Founder, Sir Nicholas Wadham, was
a wealthy Western land-owner. We may
dismiss the tradition that his first design
was to found a College of Roman Catho-
lic priests in Italy, and his second to
found a Protestant College at Oxford, as
at most significant of the prolonged wav-
ering of the religious balance in the minds
of a number of the wealthier class. The
statutes were, in the main, like those of
the mediaeval Colleges, saving in making
the Fellowship terminable after about
twenty-two years, thus more clearly desig-
nating the College as a school for active
life. The prohibition of marriage was
retained, not as an ascetic ordinance, but

96 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

as a concomitant of the College system.
In the mediaeval Colleges it was not
necessary to extend the prohibition to the
Heads, who, being priests, were bound
to celibacy by the regulations of their
Order; but marriage being now per-
mitted to the clergy generally, the pro-
hibition was in the statutes of Wadham
expressly extended, in the interest of the
College system, to the Head. Hence it
is an aspersion on the reputation of
Dame Dorothy Wadham, who, after her
husband's death, carried out his design,
and whose effigy kneels opposite that of
her loving lord in the old quadrangle, to
say that she was in love with the first
Warden, and because he would not marry

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 97

her, forbade him by statute to marry any
other woman.

These foundations, followed by that of
Pembroke and the building of the South
quadrangle of Merton, of the South quad-
rangle of Lincoln, of the West front of St.
John's, of the quadrangle and hall of Exe-
ter, of part of the quadrangle of Oriel, of
the West quadrangle of University Col-
lege, as well as of the Bodleian Library,
the Schools' quadrangle, the Convocation
House, and of the gateway of the Botanic
Garden, prove that, though the old Uni-
versity system, with its scholastic exercises,
had become hollow, there was life in Ox-
ford, and the interest of patrons of learn-

98 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

ing was attracted to it during the period
between the Reformation and the Rebel-
lion. It was also felt to be a centre of
power. Elizabeth twice visited it, once
in the heyday of her youthful glory, and
again in her haggard decline. On the
first occasion she exerted with effect those
arts of popularity which were the best part
of her statesmanship. On both occasions
she was received with ecstatic flattery and
entertained with academical exercises at
tedious length, and plays, to our taste not
less tedious, performed in College Halls.
Her successor could not fail to exhibit
himself in a seat of learning, where he
felt supreme, and, to do him justice, was
not unqualified, to shine. To his benig-

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 99

nity the University owes the questionable
privilege of sending two members to the
House of Commons, whereby it became
entangled in political as well as in theo-
logical frays.

Great changes, however, had by this
time passed or were passing over the Uni-
versity. As in former days the Halls had
absorbed the Chamberdekyns, so the Col-
leges had now almost absorbed the Halls.
They did this, not by any aggression, but
by the natural advantages of wealth, their
riches always increasing with the value of
land, and by their reputation. Most of
them, in addition to the members on the
foundation, took students as boarders, and

100 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

they got the best and wealthiest. Uni-
versities, losing their pristine character as
marts of available knowledge, and becom-
ing places of general education, ceased, by
a process equally natural, to be the heri-
tage of the poor and became the resort of
the rich. The mediaeval statutes of the
Colleges still limited the foundations to
the poor, but even these in time, by cun-
ning interpretation, were largely evaded.
Already in the later Middle Ages Oxford
had received, and, it seems, too compla-
cently received, young scions of the aris-
tocracy and gentry, the precursors of the
noblemen and the silk-gowned gentleman-
commoners of a later day. The Black
Prince had been for a short time at

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 101

Queen's College. In the reign of Henry
VI., George Neville, the brother of the
King-maker, had celebrated the taking of
his degree, a process which was probably
made easy to him, with banquets which
lasted through two days on a prodigious
scale. At the same time and for the same
causes the system of College instruction
grew in importance and gradually ousted
the lectures of University Professors.
Fellows of Colleges were not unwilling
to add to their Commons and Livery the
Tutor's stipend. Thus the importance of
the College waxed while that of the Uni-
versity waned, and the College Statutes
became more and more collectively the
law of the University. These Statutes

102 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

were mediaeval and obsolete, but they were
unalterable, the Heads and Fellows being
sworn to their observance, and there being
no power of amendment, since the Visitor
could only interpret and enforce. Thus
the mediaeval type of life and study was
stereotyped and progress was barred. The
Fellowships having been originally not
teacherships or prizes, but aids to poor
students, the Founders deemed themselves
at liberty in regulating the elections to
give free play to their local and family
partialities, and the consequence was a
mass of preferences to favoured counties
or to kin. With all these limitations, the
teaching body of the University was now
practically saddled. Even the restrictions

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 103

to particular schools — as to Winchester
in the case of New College, to West-
minster, which had been substituted for
Wolsey's Ipswich, in the case of Christ
Church, and to Merchant Tailors' School
in the case of St. John's — were noxious,
though in a less degree, albeit their bad
influence might be redeemed by some
pleasant associations. Worst of all, how-
ever, in their effect were the restrictions
to the clerical Order. This meant little
in the Middle Ages, when all intellectual
callings were clerical, when at Oxford
gownsman and clerk, townsman and laic,
were convertible terms. Wykeham, Foxe,
and Wolsey themselves were thorough
laymen in their pursuits and character,

10-1 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

though they had received the tonsure,
were qualified, if they pleased, to celebrate
mass, and derived their incomes from bish-
oprics and abbeys. But the Reformation
drew a sharp line between the clerical and
the other professions. The clergyman was
henceforth a pastor. The resident body
of graduates and the teaching staff of Ox-
ford belonging almost exclusively to the
clerical profession, the studies and inter-
ests of that profession now reigned alone.
Whatever life remained to the University
was chiefly absorbed in theological study
and controversy. This was the more de-
plorable as theology, in the mediaeval
sense, was a science almost as extinct as
astrology or alchemy. Oxford was turned

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 105

into the cock-pit of theological party. At
the same time she was bound hand and
foot to a political faction, because her
clergymen belonged to the Episcopal and
State Church, the patrons and upholders
of which, from political motives, were the
Kings and the Cavaliers, or, as they were
afterwards called, the Tories. Cambridge
suffered like Oxford, though with some
abatement, because there, owing to the
vicinity of a great Puritan district, high
Anglicanism did not prevail, and, for
reasons difficult to define, the clergy alto-
gether were less clerical. Newton was
near forfeiting his Fellowship and the
means of prosecuting his speculations be-
cause he was not in Holy Orders. Luck-

106 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

ily, a Lay Fellowship fell just in time.
Let Founders, and all who have a passion
for regulating the lives of other people,
for propagating their wills beyond the
reach of their foresight, and for grasping
posterity, as it were, with a dead hand,
take warning by a disastrous example.

As the Colleges became the University,
their Heads became the governors of the
University. They formed a Board called
the Hebdomadal Council, which initiated
all legislation, while the executive was the
Vice-Chancellorship, which, though legally
elective, was appropriated by the Heads,
and passed down their list in order.
With a single exception, the Headships

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 107

were all clerical, and they were almost
always filled by men of temperament,
to say the least, eminently conservative.
Thus academical liberty and progress
slept.

On the eve of another great storm we
have a pleasant glimpse of Oxford life and
study in Clarendon's picture of Falk-
land's circle, at Great Tew, within ten
miles of Oxford, whither, he says, " most
polite and accurate men of that Univer-
sity resorted, dwelling there as in a College
situated in a purer air, so that his was
a University bound in a less volume,
whither his intellectual friends came not
so much for repose as study, and to exam-

108 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

ine and refine those grosser propositions
which laziness and consent made current
in conversation." This indicates that,
while study was going on, liberal inquiry-
was also on foot. But clouds again gath-
ered, the storm again came, and once more
from the ecclesiastical quarter. The tri-
umph of the Reformation, the accession
of a Protestant Queen, and the Chan-
cellorship of Leicester, who, for politic
purposes, played the Puritan, had been
attended by a general expulsion or seces-
sion of the Romanising party, which left
the University for a time in the hands
of the Calvinists and Low Churchmen.
Hooker, the real father of Anglicanism,
had, for a time, studied Church antiquity

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 109

in the quiet quadrangle of Corpus, but he
had come into collision with Puritanism,
and had, for a time, been driven away by
it. Perhaps its prevalence may have ulti-
mately inclined him to exchange the Uni-
versity for a far less congenial sphere.
The clergy, however, of an Episcopal
Church, and one which laid claim to
Apostolical succession, was sure in time
to come round to High Church doctrine.
To High Church doctrine the clergy of
Oxford did come round under the leader-
ship of Laud, University Preacher, Proc-
tor, President of St. John's College, and
afterwards Chancellor of the University.
Of Laud there are several memorials at
Oxford. One is the inner quadrangle of

110 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

St. John's College, ornamented in the style
of Inigo Jones, where the Archbishop and
Chancellor, in the noontide of his career,
received with ecstasies of delight, eccle-
siastical, academical, and political, his
doomed king and master with the fatal
woman at Charles's side. Another is a
fine collection of oriental books added
to the Bodleian Library. A third and
more important is the new code of stat-
utes framed for the reformation of the
University by its all-powerful Chancellor.
A fourth is the statue of the Virgin and
Child over the porch of St. Mary's Church,
which, as proof of a Romanising tendency,
formed one of the charges against the
Archbishop, though it was really put up

ST. MARY'S CHURCH.

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. Ill

by his Chaplain. The fifth is the head-
less corpse which lies buried in the Chapel
of St. John's College, whither pious hands
conveyed it after the Restoration. Laud
was a true friend of the University and
of learned men, in whom, as in Hales,
he respected the right of inquiry, and to
whom he was willing to allow a freedom
of opinion which he would not allow to
the common herd. He was not so much
a bigot as a martinet. It was by playing
the martinet in ecclesiastical affairs that
he was brought into mortal collision with
the nation. In the code of statutes which
by his characteristic use of autocratic
power he imposed on Oxford the martinet
is betrayed ; so is the belief in the effi-

112 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

cacy of regulation. We see the man who
wrecked a kingdom for the sake of his
forms. Nor had Laud the force to deliver
University education from the shackles
of the Middle Ages and the scholastic
system. But the code is dictated by a
genuine spirit of reform, and might have
worked improvement had it been sus-
tained by a motive power.

The period of the Civil War is a gap in
academical history. Its monuments are
only traces of destruction, such as the de-
facement of Papistical images and window
paintings by the Puritan soldiery, and the
sad absence of the old College plate, of
which two thousand five hundred ounces

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 113

went to the Royal mint in New Inn Hall,
only a few most sacred pieces, such as the
Founder's drinking-horn at Queen's, and
the covered cup, reputed that of the
Founder, at Corpus, being left to console
us for the irreparable loss. Exeter Col-
lege alone seems to have shown com-
punction; perhaps there had remained in
her something of the free spirit for which
in the days of Wycliffe she had been
noted. Art and taste may mourn, but the
University, as a centre of Episcopalian-
ism, had little cause to complain ; for the
war was justly called the Bishops' war,
and by the Episcopal Church and the
Queen, between them, Charles was brought
to the block. Oxford was bound by her

114 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

ecclesiasticism to the Royal cause, and she
had the ill luck to be highly available as a
place of arms from her position between
the two rivers, while she formed an ad-
vanced post to the Western country in
which the strength of the King's cause lay.
During those years the University was in
buff and bandolier, on the drill ground
instead of in the Schools, while the Col-
leges were filled with the exiled Court and
its ghost of a Parliament. Traces of works
connecting the two rivers were not long
ago to be seen, and tradition points to
the angle in the old city wall under Mer-
ton College as the spot where Windebank,
a Royalist officer, was shot for surrender-
ing his post. There was a reign of garri-

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 115

son manners as well as of garrison duties,
and to the few who still cared for the ob-
jects of the University, even if they were
Royalists, the surrender of the city to the
Parliament may well have been a relief.

Then came Parliamentary visitation
and the purge, with the inevitable vio-
lence and inhumanity. Heads and Fel-
lows, who refused submission to the new
order of things, were turned out. Mrs.
Fell, the wife of the Dean of Christ
Church, deposed for Royalism, refused
to quit the Deanery, and at last had to
be carried out of the quadrangle, vent-
ing her wrath in strong language as she
went, by a squad of Parliamentary mus-

116 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

keteers. But the Puritans put in good
men : such as Owen, who was made
Dean of Christ Church ; Conant, who was
made Rector of Exeter; Wilkins, who
was made Warden of Wadham; and Seth
Ward, the mathematician, who was made
President of Trinity College. Owen and
Conant appear to have been model Heads.
The number of students increased. Eve-
lyn, the Anglican and Royalist, visiting
Oxford, seems to find the academical
exercises, and the state of the University
generally, satisfactory to his mind. He
liked even the sermon, barring some
Presbyterian animosities. Nor did he
find much change in College Chapels.
New College was "in its ancient garb,

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 117

notwithstanding the scrupulosity of the
times." The Chapel of Magdalen Col-
lege, likewise, was " in pontifical order,"
and the organ remained undemolished.
The Protectorate was tolerant as far as
the age allowed. Evelyn was cordially
received by the Puritan authorities and
hospitably entertained. Puritanism does
not seem to have been so very grim, what-
ever the satirist in " The Spectator " may
say. Tavern-haunting and swearing were
suppressed. So were May-poles and some
innocent amusements. But instrumental
music was much cultivated, as we learn
from the Royalist and High Church anti-
quary Anthony Wood, from whom, also,
we gather that dress, though less donnish,

118 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

was not more austere. Cromwell, having
saved the Universities from fanatics who
would have laid low all institutions of
worldly learning, made himself Chancellor
of Oxford, and sought to draw thence, as
well as from Cambridge, promising youths
for the service of the State. Even Clar-
endon admits that the Restoration found
the University " abounding in excellent
learning," notwithstanding " the wild and
barbarous depopulation " which it had
undergone ; a miraculous result, which he
ascribes, under God's blessing, to " the
goodness and richness of the soil, which
could not be made barren by all the
stupidity and negligence, but choked the
weeds, and would not suffer the poison-

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 119

ous seeds, which were sown with industry
enough, to spring up." Puritanism might
be narrowT and bibliolatrous, but it was
not obscurantist nor the enemy of science.
We see this in Puritan Oxford as well as
in Puritan Harvard and Yale. In Puritan
Oxford the scientific circle which after-
wards gave birth to the Royal Society
was formed. Its chief was Warden Wil-
kins, and it included Boyle, Wallis, Seth
Ward, and Wren. It met either in Wil-
kins's rooms at Wadham, or in those of
Boyle. Evelyn, visiting Wilkins, is rav-
ished with the scientific inventions and
experiments which he sees. On the stones
of Oxford, Puritanism has left no trace;
there was hardly any building during

120 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

those years. There were benefactions not
a few, among which was the gift of Sel-
den's Library.

Upon the Restoration followed a Royal-
ist proscription, more cruel, and certainly
more lawless, than that of the Puritans
had been. All the s;ood Heads of the
Commonwealth era were ejected, and the
Colleges received back a crowd of Royal-
ists, who, during their exclusion, had prob-
ably been estranged from academical
pursuits. Anthony Wood himself is an
unwilling witness to the fact that the
change was much for the worse. " Some
Cavaliers that were restored," he says,
" were good scholars, but the majority
were dunces." " Before the War," he says

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 121

in another place, " we had scholars who
made a thorough search in scholastic and
polemical divinity, in humane learning and
natural philosophy, but now scholars study
these things not more than what is just
necessary to carry them through the exer-
cises of their respective Colleges and the
University. Their aim is not to live as
students ought to do, temperate, abstemi-
ous, and plain in their apparel, but to live
like gentry, to keep dogs and horses, to
turn their studies into places to keep bot-
tles, to swagger in gay apparel and long
periwigs." Into the Rectorship of Exeter,
in place of the excellent Conant, was put
Joseph Maynard, of whom Wood says,
" Exeter College is now much debauched

122 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

by a drunken Governor; whereas, before,
in Doctor Conant's time, it was accounted
a civil house, it is now rude and uncivil.
The Rector is good-natured, generous,
and a good scholar, but he has forgot the
way of College life, and the decorum of a
scholar. He is much given to bibbing,
and when there is a music meeting in one
of the Fellow's chambers, he will sit there,
smoke, and drink till he is drunk, and has
to be led to his lodgings by the junior
Fellows." This is not the only evidence
of the fact that drinking, idling, and
tavern-haunting were in the ascendant.
Study as well as morality, having been the
badge of the Puritan, was out of fashion.
Wilkins's scientific circle took its depart-

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 123

ure from Oxford to London, there to
become the germ of the Royal Society.
The hope was gone at Oxford of a race of
"young men provided against the next
age, whose minds, receiving the first im-
pressions of sober and generous know-
ledge, should be invincibly armed against
all the encroachments of enthusiasm."
The presence of the merry monarch, with
his concubines, at Oxford, when his Parlia-
ment met there, was not likely to improve
morals. Oxford sank into an organ of
the High Church and Tory party, and
debased herself by servile manifestos in
favour of government by prerogative.
Non-conformists were excluded by the
religious tests, the operation of which was

124 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

more stringent than ever since the pass-
ing of the Act of Uniformity. The love
of liberty and truth embodied in Locke
was expelled from Christ Church ; not,
however, by the act of the College or of
the University, but by Royal warrant,
though Fell, Dean of Christ Church,
bowed slavishly to the tyrant's pleasure ;
so that Christ Church may look with little
shame on the portrait of the philosopher,
which now hangs triumphant in her Hall.
The Cavaliers did not much, even in the
way of building. The Sheldonian Thea-
tre was given them by the Archbishop, to
whom subscriptions had been promised,
but did not come in, so that he had to
bear the whole expense himself. He was

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 125

so deeply disgusted that he refused ever to
look upon the building.

Over the gateway of University College
stands the statue of James II. That it
should have been left there is a proof both
of the ingrained Toryism of old Oxford,
and of the mildness of the Revolution of
1688. Obadiah Walker, the Master of the
Colleges, was one of the political converts
to Roman Catholicism, and it was in ridi-
cule of him that " Old Obadiah, Ave
Maria," was sung by the Oxford populace.
A set of rooms in the same quadrangle
bears the trace of its conversion into a
Roman Catholic Chapel for the king. It
faces the rooms of Shelley. Reference

126 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

was made the other day, in an ecclesiasti-
cal lawsuit, to the singular practice which
prevails in this College, of filing out into
the ante-chapel after the sacrament to con-
sume the remains of the bread and wine,
instead of consuming them at the altar
or communion table. This probably is
a trace of the Protestant reaction which
followed the transitory reign of Roman
Catholicism under Obadiah Walker. All
are familiar with the Magdalen College
case, and with the train of events by
which the most devoutly royalist of Uni-
versities was brought, by its connection
with the Anglican Church and in defence
of the Church's possessions, into collision
with the Crown, and arrayed for the

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 127

moment on the side of constitutional lib-
erty. After the Revolution the recoil
quickly followed. Oxford became the
stronghold of Jacobitism, the scene of
treasonable talk over the wine in the
Common Room, of riotous demonstrations
by pot-valiant undergraduates in the
streets, of Jacobite orations at academical
festivals, amid frantic cheers of the as-
sembled University, of futile plotting and
puerile conspiracies which never put a
man in the field. " The king to Oxford
sent a troop of horse." But the troop of
horse was not called upon to act. There
was a small Hanoverian and constitu-
tional party, and now and then it scored
a point against its adversaries, who dared

128 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

not avow their disloyalty to the reign-
ing dynasty. A Jacobite Proctor, having
intruded into a convivial meeting of
Whigs, they tendered him the health of
King George, which, for fear of the treason
law, he was fain to drink upon his knees.

In the early part of the eighteenth cen-
tury there was some intellectual life in
Christ Church, to which Westminster
still sent up good scholars, and which was
the resort of the nobility, in whom youth-
ful ambition and desire for improvement
might be stirred by the influences of polit-
ical homes, and the prospects of a public
life. Dean Aldrich was a scholar and
a virtuoso. The spire of All Saints'

STAIRCASE. CHRIST CHURCH

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 129

Church is a soaring monument of his
taste, if not of his genius, for architecture.
In the controversy with Bentley about
the Epistles of Phalaris, Christ Church,
though she was hopelessly in the wrong,
showed that she had some learning and
some interest in classical studies. Other-
wise the eighteenth century is a blank, or
worse than a blank, in the history of the
University. The very portraits on the
College walls disclose the void of any but
ecclesiastical eminence. That tendency to
torpor, which, as Adam Smith and Turgot
have maintained, is inherent in the system
of endowments, fell upon Oxford in full
measure. The Colleges had now, by the
increase in value of their estates, become

K

130 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

rich, some of them very rich. The es-
tates of Magdalen, Gibbon tells us, were
thought to be worth thirty thousand
pounds a year, equivalent to double that
sum now. Instead of being confined to
their original Commons and Livery, the
Heads and Fellows, as administrators of
the estate, were now dividing among
themselves annually large rentals, though
they failed to increase in equal proportion
the stipends of the Scholars and others
who had no share in the administration.
The statutes of mediaeval Founders had
become utterly obsolete, and were dis-
regarded, notwithstanding the oath taken
to observe them, or observed only so far
as they guarded the interest of sine-

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 131

curists against the public. Nor were any-
other duties assumed. A few of the Fel-
lows in each College added to their income
by holding the tutorships, the functions of
which they usually performed in the most
slovenly way, each Tutor professing to
teach all subjects, while most of them
knew none. In the Common Room, with
which each of the Colleges now provided
itself, the Fellows spent lives of Trullibe-
rian luxury, drinking, smoking, playing at
bowls, and, as Gibbon said, by their deep
but dull potations excusing the brisk in-
temperance of youth. Even the obliga-
tion to residence was relaxed, and at last
practically annulled, so that a great part
of the Fellowships became sinecure sti-

132 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

pends held by men unconnected with the
University. About the only restriction
which remained was that on marriage.
Out of this the Heads had managed to slip
their necks, and from the time of Eliza-
beth downwards there had been married
Heads, to the great scandal of Anthony
Wood and other academical precisians, to
whom, in truth, one lady, at least, the wife
of Warden Clayton of Merton, seems to
have afforded some grounds for criticism
by her usurpations. But in the case of
the Fellows, the statute, being not con-
structive, but express, could not be evaded
except by stealth, and by an application of
the aphorism then current, that he might
hold anything who would hold his tongue.

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 133

The effect of this, celibacy being no
longer the rule, was to make all the Fel-
lows look forward to the benefices, of a
number of which each College was the
patron, and upon which they could marry.
Thus devotion to a life of study or educa-
tion in College, had a Fellow been inclined
to it, was impossible, under the ordinary
conditions of modern life. Idleness, in-
temperance, and riot were rife among the
students, as we learn from the novels and
memoirs of the day. Especially were
they the rule among the noblemen and
gentlemen-commoners, who were privi-
leged by their birth and wealth, and to
whom by the servility of the Dons every
license was allowed. Some Colleges took

134 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

only gentlemen-commoners, who paid
high fees and did what they pleased. All
Souls' took no students at all, and became
a mere club which, by a strange perver-
sion of a clause in their statutes, was lim-
ited to men of high family. The Univer-
sity as a teaching and examining body
had fallen into a dead swoon. Few of the
Professors even went through the form of
lecturing, and the statutory obligation of
attendance was wholly disregarded by the
students. The form of mediaeval dispu-
tations was kept up by the farcical repe-
tition of strings of senseless syllogisms,
which were handed down from generation
to generation of students. The very no-
menclature of the system had become un-

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 135

meaning. Candidates for the theological
degree paced the Divinity School for an
hour, nominally challenging opponents to
disputation, but the door was locked by
the Bedel, that no opponent might ap-
pear. Examinations were held, but the
candidates, by feeing the University offi-
cer, were allowed to choose their own
examiners, and they treated the examiner
after the ordeal. The two questions,
" What is the meaning of Golgotha ? " and
" Who founded University College ? " com-
prised the examination upon which Lord
Eldon took his degree. A little of that
elegant scholarship, with the power of writ-
ing Latin verses, of which Addison was
the cynosure, was the most of which Ox-

136 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

ford could boast. Even this there could
hardly have been had not the learned
languages happened to have formed an
official part of the equipment of the cleri-
cal profession. Of science, or the mental
habit which science forms, there was none.
Such opportunities for study, such libra-
ries, such groves, a livelihood so free from
care could scarcely fail, now and then, to
give birth to a learned man, an Addison, a
Lowth, a Thomas Warton, an Elmsley, a
Martin Routh.

The Universities being the regular fin-
ishing schools of the gentry and the pro-
fessions, men who had passed through
them became eminent in after life, but

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 137

they owed little or nothing to the Uni-
versity. Only in this way can Oxford lay
claim to the eminence of Bishop Butler,
Jeremy Bentham, or Adam Smith, while
Gibbon is her reproach. The figures of
Lord Eldon and Lord Stowell, whose pon-
derous twin statues sit side by side in the
Library of University College, were more
academical, especially that of Lord Stowell,
who was Tutor of his College, and held
a lectureship of Ancient History. Here
and there a Tutor of the better stamp, no
doubt, would try to do his duty by his
pupils. A rather pathetic interest attaches
to Richard Newton, who tried to turn
Hart Hall into a real place of education,
and had some distinguished pupils, among

138 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

them Charles Fox. But the little lamp
which he had kindled went out in the
uncongenial air. On the site, thanks to
the munificence of Mr. Baring, now stands
Hertford College. Johnson's residence at
Pembroke College was short, and his narra-
tive shows that it was unprofitable, though
his High Church principles afterwards
made him a loyal son and eulogist of the
University. One good effect the interdic-
tion of marriage had. It kept up a sort of
brotherhood, and saved corporate munifi-
cence from extinction by the private inter-
est of fathers of families. As the College
revenues increased, building went on,
though after the false classical fashion of
the times and mostly for the purpose of

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 139

College luxury. Now rose the new quad-
rangle of Queen's, totally supplanting the
mediaeval College, and the new buildings
at Magdalen and Corpus. A plan is ex-
tant, horrible to relate, for the total demo-
lition of the old quadrangle of Magdalen,
and its replacement by a modern palace
of idleness in the Italian style. To this
century belong Peckwater and Canterbury
quadrangles, also in the classical style, the
first redeemed by the Library which fills
one side of the square, and which has a
heavy architectural grandeur as well as
a noble purpose. To the eighteenth cen-
tury we also mainly owe the College gar-
dens and walks as we see them ; and the
gardens of St. John's, New College, Wad-

140 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

ham, Worcester, and Exeter, with the lime
walk at Trinity and the Broadwalk — now
unhappily but a wreck — at Christ Church,
may plead to a student's heart for some
mitigation of the sentence on the race of
clerical idlers and wine-bibbers, who, for
a century, made the University a place,
not of education and learning, but of dull
sybaritism, and a source, not of light, but
of darkness, to the nation. It is sad to
think how different the history of England
might have been had Oxford and Cam-
bridge done their duty, like Harvard and
Yale, during the last century.

At the end of the last or beginning of
the present century came the revival. At

H
Z

o

•-

X

o

D
X

o
\-

x
o

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 141

the end of the last century Christ Church
had some brilliant classical scholars amonof
her students, though the great scene of
their eminence was not the study but the
senate. The portraits of Wellesley and
Canning hang in her Hall. In the early
part of the present century the general
spirit of reform and progress, which had
been repressed during the struggle with
revolutionary France, began to move again
over the face of the torpid waters. Eve-
leigh, Provost of Oriel, led the way. At
his College and at Balliol the elections
to Fellowships were free from local or
genealogical restrictions. They were now
opened to merit, and those two Colleges,
though not among the first in wealth or

142 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

magnificence, attained a start in the race
of regeneration which Balliol, being very
fortunate in its Heads, has since in a
remarkable manner maintained. The ex-
amination system of Laud had lacked a
motive power, and had depended, like his
policy, on his fiat instead of vital force.
There was no sufficient inducement for
the examiner to be strict or for the candi-
date to excel. The motive power was now
supplied by a list of honours in classics
and mathematics, and among the earliest
winners in the first class in both schools
was Robert Peel.

Scarcely, however, had the University
begun to awake to a new life, when it

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 143

was swept by another ecclesiastical storm,
the consequence of its unhappy identifica-
tion with clericism and the State Church.
The liberal movement which commenced
after the fall of Napoleon and carried the
Reform Bill, threatened to extend to the
religious field, and to withdraw the sup-
port of the State from the Anglican
Church. This led the clergy to look out
for another basis, which they found in the
reassertion of High Church and sacerdotal
doctrines, such as apostolical succession,
eucharistical real presence, and baptismal
regeneration. Presently the movement as-
sumed the form of a revival of the Church
of the Middle Ages, such as High Church
imagination pictured it, and ultimately of

144 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

secession to Rome. Oxford, with her me-
diaeval buildings, her High Church tradi-
tion, her half-monastic Colleges, and her
body of unmarried clergy, became the
centre of the movement. The Romanis-
ing tendencies of Tractarianism, as from
the " Tracts for the Times " it was called,
visible from the first, though disclaimed
by the leaders, aroused a fierce Protestant
reaction, which encountered Tractarian-
ism both in the press and in the councils
of the University. The Armageddon of
the ecclesiastical war was the day on
which, in a gathering of religious parti-
sans from all sections of the country
which the Convocation House would not
hold, so that it was necessary to adjourn

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 145

to the Sheldonian Theatre, Ward, the
most daring of the Tractarian writers,
after a scene of very violent excitement,
was deprived of his degree. This was the
beginning of the end. Newman, the real
leader of the movement, though Pusey,
from his academical rank, was the official
leader, soon recognised the place to which
his principles belonged, and was on his
knees before a Roman Catholic priest,
supplicating for admission to the Church
of Rome. A ritualistic element remained,
and now reigns, in the Church of Eng-
land ; but the party which Newman left,
bereft of Newman, broke up, and its relics
were cast like drift-wood on every theo-
logical or philosophical shore. Newman's

146 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

poetic version of mediaeval religion, to-
gether with the spiritual graces of his
style and his personal influence, had for
a time filled the imaginations and car-
ried away the hearts of youth, while the
seniors were absorbed in the theological
controversy, renounced lay studies, and
disdained educational duty except as it
might afford opportunities of winning
youthful souls to the Neo-Catholic faith.
Academical duty would have been utterly
lost in theological controversy, had it not
been for the Class List, which bound the
most intellectual undergraduates to lay
studies by their ambition, and kept on
foot a staff of private teachers, " coaches,"
as they were called, to prepare men for

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 147

the examinations, who did the duty which
the ecclesiastical Fellows of the Univer-
sity disdained. The Oxford movement
has left a monument of itself in the Col-
lege founded in memory of Keble, the
gentle and saintly author of " The Chris-
tian Year." It has left an ampler monu-
ment in the revival of mediaeval archi-
tecture at Oxford, and the style of new
buildings which everywhere meet the eye.
The work of the Oxford Architectural
Society, which had its birth in the Neo-
Catholic movement, may prove more dur-
able than that movement itself. Of the
excess to which the architectural revival
was carried, the new Library at Univer-
sity College, more like a mediaeval Chapel

148 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

than a Library, is a specimen. It was
proposed to give Neo-Catholicism yet
another monument by erecting close to
the spot where Cranmer, Latimer, and
Ridley died for truth, the statue of Car-
dinal Newman, the object of whose pur-
suit through life had been, not truth, but
an ecclesiastical ideal. Of the reaction
against the Tractarian movement the
monument is the memorial to the Protes-
tant martyrs Cranmer, Latimer, and Rid-
ley, the subscription for which commenced
among the Protestants who had come up
to vote for the condemnation of Ward, and
which Tractarians scornfully compared to
the heap of stones raised over the body of
Achan.

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 149

Here ended the reign of ecclesiasticism,
of the Middle Ages, and of religious ex-
clusion. The collision into which Roman-
ising Oxford had been brought with the
Protestantism of the British nation, prob-
ably helped to bring on the revolution
which followed, and which restored the
University to learning, science, and the
nation. The really academical element in
the University invoked the aid of the
national government and Legislature. A
Royal Commission of Inquiry into the
state of the University and its Colleges
was appointed, and though some Colleges
closed their muniment rooms, and inquiry
was obstructed, enough was revealed in
the Report amply to justify legislative

150 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

reform and emancipation. An act of
Parliament was passed which set free the
University and Colleges alike from their
mediaeval statutes, restored the University
Professoriate, opened the Fellowships to
merit, and relaxed the religious tests.
The curriculum, the examination system,
and the honour list were liberalised, and
once more, as in early times, all the great
departments of knowledge were recog-
nised and domiciled in the University.
Science, long an exile, was welcomed
back to her home at the moment when
a great extension of her empire was at
hand. Strictly professional studies, such
as practical law and medicine, could not
be recalled from their professional seats.

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 151

Elections to Fellowships by merit re-
placed election by local or school prefer-
ences, by kinship, or by the still more
objectionable influences which at one time
had been not unfelt. Colleges which had
declined the duty of education, which had
been dedicated to sinecurism and indo-
lence, and whose quadrangles had stood
empty, were filled with students, and once
more presented a spectacle which would
have gladdened the heart of the Founder.
A Commission, acting on a still more
recent Act of Parliament, has carried the
adaptation of Oxford to the modern re-
quirements of science and learning further
than the old Commission, which acted in
the penumbra of mediaeval and ecclesiasti-

152 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

cal tradition, dared. The intellectual Ox-
ford of the present day is almost a fresh
creation. Its spirit is new ; it is liberal,
free, and progressive. It is rather too
revolutionary, grave seniors say, so far as
the younger men are concerned. This is
probably only the first forward bound of
recovered freedom, which will be suc-
ceeded in time by the sober pace of learn-
ing and scientific investigation. Again,
as in the thirteenth century, the day of
Grosseteste and Simon de Montfort, Ox-
ford is a centre of progress, instead of
being, as under the later Stuarts, the
stronghold of reaction. Of the College
revival, the monuments are all around in
the new buildings, for which increasing

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 153

numbers have called, and which revived
energy has supplied. Christ Church, New-
College, Magdalen, Merton, Balliol, Trin-
ity, University have all enlarged their
courts, and in almost every College new
life has been shown by improvement or
restoration. Of the reign of medievalism
the only trace is the prevalence in the new
buildings of the mediaeval style, which
architectural harmony seemed to require,
though the new buildings of Christ
Church and Trinity are proofs of a happy
emancipation from architectural tradition.
The University revival has its monument
in the new examination Schools in High
Street, where the student can no longer
get his degree by giving the meaning of

154 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

Golgotha and the name of the Founder
of University College. There are those
who, like Mark Pattison, look on it with
an evil eye, regarding the examination
system as a noxious excrescence and as
fatal to spontaneous study and research ;
though they would hardly contend that
spontaneous study and research flourished
much at Oxford before the revival of ex-
aminations, or deny that since the revival
Oxford has produced the fruits of study
and research, at least to a fair extent.
The restoration of science is proclaimed
by the new Museum yonder; a strange
structure, it must be owned, which sym-
bolises, by the unfitness of its style for its
purpose, at once the unscientific character

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 155

of the Middle Ages, and the lingering
attachment of Oxford to the mediaeval
type. Of the abolition of the religious
tests, and the restoration of the Univer-
sity to the nation, a monument is Mans-
field College for Congregationalists, a
vision of which would have thrown an
orthodox and Tory Head of a College
into convulsions half a century ago.
Even here the mediaeval style of archi-
tecture keeps its hold, though the places
of Catholic Saints are taken by the statues
of Wycliffe, Luther, John Knox, White-
field, and Wesley. By the side of Mans-
field College rises also Manchester College
for Independents, in the same architectu-
ral style. Neither of them, however, is in

156 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

the Oxford sense a College ; both are
places of theological instruction.

On the North of the city, where fifty
years ago stretched green fields, is now
seen a suburb of villas, all of them be-
speaking comfort and elegance, few of
them overweening wealth. These are
largely the monuments of another great
change, the removal of the rule of celi-
bacy from the Fellowships, and the in-
troduction of a large body of married
teachers devoted to their profession, as
well as of the revival of the Professorships,
which were always tenable by married men.
Fifty years ago the wives of Heads of
Houses, who generally married late in life

OXFORD AND PIER COLLEGES. 157

if they married at all, constituted, with
one or two officers of the University, the
whole female society of Oxford. The
change was inevitable, if education was to
be made a profession, instead of being, as
it had been in the hands of celibate Fel-
lows of Colleges, merely the transitory
occupation of a man whose final destina-
tion was the parish. Those who remem-
ber the old Common Room life, which is
now departing, cannot help looking back
with a wistful eye to its bachelor ease,
its pleasant companionship, its interesting
talk and free interchange of thought, its
potations neither " deep " nor " dull." Nor
were its symposia without important fruits
when such men as Newman and Ward,

158 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

on one side, encountered such men as
Whately, Arnold, and Tait, on the other
side, in Common Room talk over great
questions of the day. But the life became
dreary when a man had passed forty, and
it is well exchanged for the community
that fills those villas, and which, with its
culture, its moderate and tolerably equal
incomes, permitting hospitality but forbid-
ding luxury, and its unity of interests with
its diversity of acquirements and accom-
plishments, seems to present the ideal con-
ditions of a pleasant social life. The only
question is, how the College system will be
maintained when the Fellows are no longer
resident within the walls of the College to
temper and control the younger members,

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 159

for a barrack of undergraduates is not a
good thing. The personal bond and in-
tercourse between Tutor and pupil under
the College system was valuable as well as
pleasant; it cannot be resigned without
regret. But its loss will be compensated
by far superior teaching. Half a century
ago conservatism strove to turn the rail-
way away from Oxford. But the railway
came, and it brings, on summer Sundays,
to the city of study and thought not a few
leaders of the active wTorld. Oxford is
now, indeed, rather too attractive ; her
academical society is in danger of being
swamped by the influx of non-academical
residents.

160 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

The buildings stand, to mark by their
varying architecture the succession of the
changeful centuries through which the
University has passed. In the Libraries
are the monuments of the successive gen-
erations of learning. But the tide of
youthful life that from age to age has
flowed through college, quadrangle, hall,
and chamber, through University exami-
nation-rooms and Convocation Houses,
has left no memorials of itself except the en-
tries in the University and College books ;
dates of matriculation, which tell of the
bashful boy standing before the august
Vice-Chancellor at entrance ; dates of de-
grees, which tell of the youth putting
forth, from his last haven of tutelage, on

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 161

the waves of the wide world. Hither they
thronged, century after century, in the
costume and with the equipments of their
times, from mediaeval abbey, grange, and
hall, from Tudor manor-house and home-
stead, from mansion, rectory, and commer-
cial city of a later day, bearing with them
the hopes and affections of numberless
homes. Year after year they departed,
lingering for a moment at the gate to say
farewell to College friends, the bond with
whom they vowed to preserve, but whom
they were never to see again, then stepped
forth into the chances and perils of life,
while the shadow on the College dial
moved on its unceasing round. If they
had only left their names in the rooms

M

162 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES.

which they had occupied, there would be
more of history than we have in those dry
entries in the books. But, at all events,
let not fancy frame a history of student
life at Oxford out of " Verdant Green."
There are realities corresponding to "Ver-
dant Green," and the moral is, that many
youths come to the University who had
better stay away, since none get any good
and few fail to get some harm, saving those
who have an aptitude for study. But the
dissipation, the noisy suppers, the tandem-
driving, the fox-hunting, the running away
from Proctors, or, what is almost as bad,
the childish devotion to games and sports
as if they were the end of existence,
though they are too common a part of

o

z

o

<
a:

w

H
<
O
DP

OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES. 163

undergraduate life in the University of the
rich, are far from being the whole of it.
Less than ever are they the whole of it
since University reform and a more lib-
eral curriculum have increased, as cer-
tainly they have, industry and frugality at
the same time. Of the two or three thou-
sand lamps which to-night will gleam from
those windows, few will light the supper-
table or the gambling-table ; most will
light the book. Youthful effort, ambition,
aspiration, hope, College character and
friendship have no artist to paint them, —
at least as yet they have had none. But
whatever of poetry belongs to them is
present in full measure here.

INDEX.

Addison, Joseph, 136.
Aldrich, Henry, 128.
Alfred (King), 24, 51.
All Souls' College, 67 et sq.
Amusements, mediaeval, 43.
Antiquity, apparent, of the

buildings, 3.
Architectural revival at Oxford,

147, 148.
Aristotle, 31.
Ashmolean Museum, 24.
Augustinians, 35.
Aula, 39.

Bacon, Roger, 32, n, 37.
Bacon, Sir Nicholas, 91.
Balliol College, 50; intellect-
ual revival in, 141.
Baring, T. C, 138.
Benedictines, 35.
Bentham, Jeremy, 137.
Bentley, Richard, 129.

Black Prince, the, 100.

Bocardo, 88.

Bodleian Library, 19, 20, 21,

97-
Bodley, Sir Thomas, 20, 93.
Bologna, University of, 29.
Botanic Garden, 97.
Boyle, Charles, 119.
Bradwardine, Thomas, 31.
Brasenose College, 67 et sq.,

74, 75-
Broadwalk, the, 140.
Brome, Adam de, 52.
Buildings, dates of, 3 et sq.
Butler, Bishop, 137.

Cardinal College, 83.

Carmellites, 35.

Celibacy enjoined on Heads of

Colleges, 96 ; effects of its

withdrawal, 132, 133.
Chamberdekyns, 39, 99.

165

166

INDEX.

Charles I. at Oxford, 113, 114.

Charles II. at Oxford, 123.

Chicheley, Archbishop, 70, 71.

Christ Church Cathedral, 35.

Christ Church College, 80 et
sq. ; intellectual revival in,
128, 129, 140, 141.

Cistercians, 35.

Civil War, Oxford in the time
of the, 112 et sq.

Clarendon, Earl of, 18, 107.

Clarendon Building, 18, 19.

Clarendon Press, 19.

Class Lists, 142.

Clayton, Thos., wife of, 132.

Clerical profession, dominance
of, 104.

Colet, John, 76.

College life, 9 et sq.

Colleges, administration and
government of, 9 et sq. ;
growing importance of, 99
et sq. ; the present intellect-
ual revival in the, 152 et sq.

Commemoration, 15.

Common Room life, 157.

Commons, 49.

Commonwealth, Oxford in the
time of the, 114 et sq.

Conant, John, 116.

Congregation, 8.
Convocation, 8.

Convocation House, 13, 14, 97.
Corpus Christi College, 75.
Cranmer, Archbishop, 88, 89.
Cromwell, Oliver, Chancellor
of Oxford, 118.

Degrees, manner of conferring,

13-

Disputation, stress laid upon,

3°-
Divinity School, 14.
Dominicans, 36.
Duns Scotus, 31.
Durham College, 91.

Egglesfield, Robert, 52.
Eldon, Lord, 135, 137.
Elizabeth (Queen), 98.
Elmsley, Peter, 136.
Erasmus, D., 76.
" Essays and Reviews," authors

of, 24.
Eton, 59.

Eveleigh, John, 141.
Evelyn, John, 116, 119.
Examinations, 21, 22.
Examination system, the, 153,

154-

INDEX.

167

Examination - rooms. See

Schools.
Exeter College, 50, 53 et sq.

Faculties, 28.
Falkland, Viscount, 107.
Fawkes's (Guy) lantern, 21.
Fell, John, 124.
Fellows, 46.
Fellowships, 102.
Fleming, Bishop, 68.
Founders, portraits of, 21.
Foxe, Bishop, 77.
Franciscans, 36.
Frydeswide, St., 87.

Gibbon, Edward, 137.
Gladstone, W. E., 22.
Graduation. See Degrees.
Great Hall of the University,

the, 51.
Great Tew, 107.
Grocyn, William, 76.
Grosseteste, Robert, 38, 44.

Halls, 39, 98, 99.
Hart Hall, 137.
Hebdomadal Council, 106.
Hertford College, i38.

High Church Traditions at
Oxford, 144 et sq.

Hooker, Richard, 108.

Houses, monastic, 50.

Humanists, the, 77.

Humphrey, Duke of Glouces-
ter, 20, 76.

Inception, 31.

Jacobitism at Oxford, 127, 128.

James I., 22, 98.

James II., statue of, 125.

Jesus College, 94.

Jews at Oxford in the Middle

Ages, 42.
Johnson, Samuel, at Oxford,

138.

Keble, John, 147.
Keble College, 147.

Laud, Archbishop, 109 et sq.

Leicester, Earl of, 108.

Lime Walk at Trinity College,

the, 140.
Linacre, Thomas, 76.
Lincoln College, 67 et sq.
Livery, 49.
Locke, John, 124.
Lowth, Robert, 136.

168

INDEX.

Magdalen College, 67 et sq., 72

et sq., 130.
Magdalen College Case, 126.
Manchester College, 155.
Manning, H. E., 24.
Mansfield College, 155.
Marisco, Adam de, 44.
Martyr, Catherine, 87.
Maynard, Joseph, 121.
Mendicant Orders, 36.
Merton, Walter de, 44, 45.
Merton College, 45 et sq.
Mob Quad, 45.
Monastic Orders, 35.
Monastic Oxford, 35.
Monasteries, 35, 37, 50, 53.
Montfort, Simon de, 37, 38.
More, Sir Thomas, 76.
Museum, the Ashmolean. See

Ashmolean.
Museum, the University, 153,

"54-

Neo-Catholicism. See Tracta-

rianism.
Neville, George, 101.
Newman, J. H., 14, 24, 145,

148.
New College, 55 et sq.
Newton, Isaac, 105.

Newton, Richard, 137.
Non-conformists excluded, 123.

Ockham, 31.

Oldham, Hugh, 78.

Oriel College, 50, 52.

Osney Abbey, 35.

Owen, John, 116.

Oxford (the name), derivation
of, 2.

Oxford Architectural Society,
147.

Oxford (the city) , situation of,
I; environs of, I, 2; of the
13th century, 27 et sq.

Oxford (the University), ad-
ministration and government
of, 7 et sq., 106 et sq. ; origin
and growth of, 25 et sq. ; po-
litical proclivities of, 28, 37,
105; in the 18th century,
150 etsq.; in the 19th cen-
tury, 140 et sq./ intellectual
revival of, in the present day,
152.

Oxford Movement, the. See
Tractarianism.

Oxford University Commis-
sions (1850 and 1876), 149,
151.

INDEX.

169

Papacy, the, and the Universi-
ties, 34, 37.

Paris, University of, 27, 34.

Pattison, Mark, 70.

Pembroke College, 97.

Peel, Robert, 142.

Petre, Sir William, 93.

Philippa, Queen, 52.

Philosophy, Scholastic, early ad-
diction to, 30.

Pope, Cardinal, 92.

Pope, Sir Thomas, 91.

Portraits of Founders, 21.

Press, the University (see also
Clarendon Press), 19.

Proctors, 10, 13, 14.

Professors, 10.

Protectorate, the. See Com-
monwealth.

Puritanism and Oxford, \\$ el
sq.

Pusey, E. B., 24, 145.

Queen's College, 50, 52.

Radcliffe, Dr. John, 23.
Radcliffe Library, 23.
Reformation, influence of, on

Oxford, 108, no.
Religious tests, 90.

Renaissance, the Mediaeval, 23.

Restoration, the, and Oxford,
1 20 el sq.

Revolution, the (1688), and
Oxford, 125, 127.

Richard III. at Oxford, 73, 74.

Rotheram, Bishop, 69.

Routh, Martin, 136.

Royal Commissions. See Ox-
ford University Commissions.

Royal Society, The, 119 el sq.

St. Frydeswide's Church, 35.

St. John's College, 92.

St. Mary of Winton, College

of, 56.
St. Mary's Church, 15, 24.
St. Michael's Church, 25.
Salerno, University of, 27.
Scholars, 46 el sq.
Schools, the, 21.
Schools, the new examination,

«53-

Sermons, University, 24.
Sheldon, Archbishop, 14.
Sheldonian Theatre, 14, 15,

124, 125.
Smith, Adam, 137.
Socii, 46.
Sports, 162.

170

INDEX.

Statutes, fettering influence of,
ioi, 102; disregarded, 130.

Stowell, Lord, 137.

Student life, mediaeval, 39 et sq.,
63 et sq.

Students, mediaeval, 39, 41 et
sq. ; their affrays with the
townspeople, 41, 42; their
amusements, 43.

Suburbs of Oxford, 156 et sq.

Teachers, the first, at Oxford,

28.
Tests. See Religious tests.
Theology, 32.

Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, 73.
Tom Tower, 81.
Tractarianism, 145 et sq.
Trinity College, 91.
"Trojans, The," 77.
Turner's picture of Oxford, 2.
Tutors, 9.

Undergraduate life, modern,

162, 163.
Universities, rise of, in Europe,

27.
University College, 51.
University Gallery, 21.

"Verdant Green," 162.
Vice-Chancellorship, the, 106.
Vives, Juan Luis, 81.

Wadham, Dorothy, 96.

Wadham, Sir Nicholas, 95.

Wadham College, 94.

Walker, Obadiah, 126.

Ward, Seth, 116.

Ward, W. G., 145.

Warton, Thomas, 136.

Waynflete, Bishop, 72, 73.

Wellington, Duke of, his inau-
guration as Chancellor, 17.

Wesley, John, 70.

White, Sir Thomas, 92, 93.

Wilkins, John, 1 1 6, 119, 122.

William of Durham, 50.

William of Wykeham, 55 et sq.

Winchester School, 58.

Windebank, Thos., 114.

Wolsey, Cardinal, 59, 81, 82
et sq.

Wood, Anthony {quoted), 120,
121.

Worcester College, 35.

Wren, Christopher, 3, 82.

Wycliffe, John, 54.

Wykeham. See William of
Wykeham.

WORKS BY PROFESSOR GOLDWIN SMITH.

Third Edition now ready.

THE UNITED STATES.

An Outline of Political History, 1492-1871.
With Map. Crown 8vo. $2.00.

" His survey of events is luminous, his estimate of character is singu-
larly keen and just, and his style is at once incisive, dignified, and scholarly.
. . . No one who takes up Mr. Goldwin Smith's volume will readily lay it
down before he has finished it ; no one will lay it down without acknowledg-
ing the rare gifts of the writer." — The Times.

" It is a literary masterpiece, as readable as a novel, remarkable for its
compression without dryness, and its brilliancy without any rhetorical effort
or display. What American could, with so broad a grasp and so perfect a
style, have rehearsed our political history from Columbus to Grant in 300
duodecimo pages of open type, or would have manifested greater candor in
his judgment of men and events in a period of four centuries? It is enough
to say that no one before Mr. Smith has attempted the feat, and that he has
the field to himself." — The Nation.

Just Published.

ESSAYS ON QUESTIONS OF
THE DAY.

Political and Social.
i2tno. Cloth. $2.25.

MACMILLAN & CO.,

66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK.
1

WORKS BY PROFESSOR GOLDWIN SMITH.

CANADA AND THE CANADIAN
QUESTION.

With Map. Demy 8vo. Cloth. $2.00.

" The book is admirably concise in method, often epigrammatic in the
sweeping generalizations. The method is modern, moreover, in that it takes
account of social forms and prejudices, of popular thought, in short, as well
as of the political plans of the few so-called leaders of men." — Hamlin
Garland, in The A rena.

THREE ENGLISH STATESMEN.

A Course of Lectures on the Political History of England.
i2tno. $1.50.

Contents. — Pym; Cromwell; Pitt.

A TRIP TO ENGLAND.

New and Revised Edition.

i8mo. Cloth, gilt top. 75 cents.

"So delightful a cicerone as Mr. Goldwin Smith proves himself in 'A
Trip to England ' does not often fall to the lot of the non-personally con-
ducted. . . . Meissonier-like in its diminutiveness, but also Meissonier-like
in its mastery." — Critic.

MACMILLAN & CO.,

66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK.

2

WORKS BY PROFESSOR GOLDWIN SMITH.

Just Published.

SPECIMENS OF GREEK TRAGEDY.

2 vols. i6mo. Buckram, gilt top. $1.25 each.

Vol. I., /Eschylus and Sophocles ; Vol. II., Euripides.

bay leaves.

Translations from the Latin Poets.

i6mo. Buckram, gilt top. $1.25.

" It has been given to but few to approach, and to none in our estimation
to surpass, the delicate perception and the exquisite grace with which Pro-
fessor Goldwin Smith has served up this glorious classic feast with choicest
English and in faultless style." — The Week.

Specimens of Greek Tragedy, 2 vols., and Bay Leaves, 1 vol.,
together, 3 vols, in box, $3.75.

MACMILLAN & CO.,

66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK.
3

HARVARD COLLEGE BY AN
OXONIAN.

By GEORGE BIRKBECK HILL, D.C.L.,

Pembroke College, Oxford; Editor of " Boswell's Life of
Johnson"; Author of "Writers and Readers, Etc.

Illustrated with New Frontispiece Portrait in Photogravure of
President Eliot, and with Views of the Principal Build-
ings, including the oldest Picture of the College.

i2mo. "Crimson" cloth, gilt top. pp. 329. $2.25.

The accomplished and scholarly editor of Boswell's Johnson, Dr. G.
Birkbeck Hill, records in this volume his impressions of Harvard in a very
entertaining series of chapters, touching upon such subjects as, for instance,
The Growth of Harvard — Cambridge in England and Cambridge in New
England — The College Chapel — Fagging and "Hazing" — Odd Charac-
ters— After-dinner Speeches — Class-day — The Athletic Craze — Signs and
" Shingles" — Harvard and Yale — The Elective System — The Law School
— The Lawrence Scientific School — Radcliffe College — The Library — The
Faculty — Oxford and Harvard.

" Harvard has found a worthy foreign chronicler in Dr. Hill, the learned
editor of ' Boswell.' "

MACMILLAN & CO.,

66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK.
4

University of British Columbia Library

DATE DUE

'

mt hoi

FORM No. 310

UNIVERSITY OF B.C. LIBRARY

3 9424 01192 6869

mm

Hi

Ijgc

'.,'••',•.,'■

■V-;' '/^':;^''

: V. ■ .

''■•■■'■•'■v'-i-'''.':